[Mailman-Users] Using mailman for one-time use special demographic lists...

[Bill.Costa at unh.edu]

Dear mailman Folks,

We're planning on moving off our our creaky old ListProc MLM and
moving to something with a web interface and an active community.
I'm seriously looking at mailman as future MLM for all our
mailing lists (~600).

I was hoping somebody could describe, in broad arm-waving terms,
how Mailman could be used as a back-end for doing mailings to
one-time use distribution lists.  Here's the scenario:

    The sender will identify the desired demographic, say "left
    handed liberal arts majors with blue eyes", by creating an SQL
    WHERE clause that selects those folks from our Student
    Information System.  (We use a commercial product called
    Banner that sits on an Oracle DB engine.)

    So what I'll have to work with are unique user IDs which I can
    then turn into a set names and e-mail addresses that exist
    within our various e-mail and alias systems.  And of course
    I'll be handed a message to be distributed and the e-mail
    address of the sender.  After this particular list is built
    and the message has been sent, that particular demographic may
    not ever be used again.

    Finally, there is the possibility that I would have the unique
    ID, name, and e-mail address for all possible users stored in
    an LDAP.  But the LDAP would contain no other selector
    information, such as eye color.  :-)   In other words the
    demographic selection process would always have to be made in
    Oracle.

Now as a point of comparison, here is how I currently handle the
above situation with ListProc:

    I have a standing generic list, configured for one-way
    announcements, let's call it "UNH.Announce".  I use a Perl
    script to take the IDs and map them to names/e-mail addresses
    and use that data to build a flat file subscriber list in the
    exact format that ListProc builds for itself.  I then run a
    command that causes ListProc to re-cache the list.  I make the
    sender the temporary owner of the list (to have exclusive
    posting permission), post the message as that user, and then
    flip the ownership back and zero out the list to prevent
    accidental re-use.

I see that Mailman has a mass subscription function, so I could
do something similar using that facility.  But at this point I
don't know enough about mailman to know if there would be a more
proper mailman-ish solution to this problem.

Thanks in advance for any insights.  And to all here's wishing
you a safe and happy holidays.

                                                     ...BC

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