[Mailman-Users] How to send messages out to only a portion of themembers?

[Mark Sapiro]

Alan McConnell wrote:

>	I have an idea, but not the Mailman/Python skills to implement
>	it.  It is as follows:
>Every month, create(automatically if possible) a new temporary  mailman
>E-list(*).   Copy(automatically if possible) the members -- and data --
>of the members to be reminded -- to this new temporary List.  Blast out
>the warning.(Blast out a second time if deemed necessary).  Destroy
>this temporary List.
>(*)  If the regular List is called AbracaDabra, the new temporary
>List can be called AbracaDabra-Remind, thus alerting AbracaDabra
>members that here is an E-mail related to AbracaDabra, and should
>be paid attention to.
>
>	Is there anything in the above suggestion that is impossible?
>	If not, how much effort -- Python writing, etc -- would be
>	needed?  It would seem to me that such a capability would be
>	very useful for all kinds of groups and a multitude of purposes.


I would do the following:

Create an announcement list named AbracaDabra-Remind following the
guidelines in the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/3YA9>. This list will
be permanent, but its membership will change. It should probably have 
Privacy options... -> Subscription rules -> advertised = No and
Archiving Options -> archive = No.
	
Then, using your membership data, create a list of the email addresses
that you want to mail to and use that as input to Mailman's
bin/sync_members (with options --welcome-msg=no, --goodbye-msg=no and
--notifyadmin=no) and post your reminder. This could all be done
automatically in a cron job, perhaps using bin/inject to make the post.

Whether this is easy or hard depends on your membership database.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan