[Mailman-Users] Duplicate Messages

[Barry Finkel]

David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:

>I have a problem, and don't know if there is an easy or viable 
>solution.  I run a bunch of lists for an organization, over 150 
>lists, about 80 percent public and 20 percent private.  Periodically 
>there are messages that need to go to everyone, or almost 
>everyone.  However, people belong to multiple lists so many people 
>get duplicate copies of the same message.
>
>Is there any way to send to everyone, or sub-sets of everyone?  Is it 
>possible to subscribe everybody to an announce-only list, at the same 
>time they subscribe to their chosen list or lists?  Not sure I want 
>that approach, but an option if possible.

If I had to do this, I would do the following:

1) Create a new Mailman list - all-subscribers.

2) Make a list of all subscribers to all lists.  I already have
   a shell script (with awk files) that produces a list every hour
   that contains lines:

         Tue Aug  4 13:00:01 CDT 2009
         ----------
         list1 user1 at example.com
         list1 user2 at example.com
         ----------
         list2 user1 at example.com
         list2 user3 at example.com
         ----------

   I use this file to see if a given address is subscribed to any
   lists.

3) Extract the e-mail addresses from that list, pipe through "uniq",
   and save the file.  You could do special processing to remove
   certain addresses from this file.

4) Use that file to

        ./sync_members -w=no -g=no -d=no -a=no -f  FILENAME all-subscribers

   to synchronize (silently) the membership of the all-subscribers list,
   which contains all the members of all the lists.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994