[Mailman-Users] question about email automation

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Fabian A. Santiago writes:

 > i run a mailing list on mm 2.x. periodically i send out an event
 > opening email to the list. this is typically followed by a
 > conclusion email at the end of a specific period. in the interim
 > period i would like to send out reminders of the event to the list
 > but would like to automate this task.  i want the reminders to be
 > triggered by my opening email and end with my conclusion email.

Mailman 2 depends on cron for periodic activity.  How to set up a cron
job depends on your system.  I'd guess the 'ifttt' and 'zapier'
utilities depend on cron as well, but I've never heard of them before.

Even if the scripting described below sounds painful, perhaps a
description of the process will help make sense of the utilities you
mentioned.

There are two basic ways to do this, one of which involves Mailman
itself, and one which does not.  The one that does not involves
creating a script, which you attach to a specific mailbox (this is MTA
specific).  Then you send the announcement mail to that mailbox, which
invokes the script.  The script places the reminder message in a
specific place (formatted as a reply to the announcement message), and
sends the announcement mail to the list address.  Then the cron job
triggers periodically, and sends out any messages that are in the
specific place (this is MTA specific, but "sendmail -t < message"
works on most systems).  You also send the conclusion email to that
place, as a reply to the announcement message.  The script parses out
the In-Reply-To message-id, scans the specific place for messages that
are replies to that message-id, and deletes them.  Then it sends the
conclusion email to the list address.

The other is basically the same, except that you send the announcement
and conclusion mails to the list address, marked as one of your
announcements in some way.  Basically the same code as above, with the
addition of first checking if the message is an announcement or a
conclusion (if not, it does nothing), is added to Mailman as a
Handler.  (This can be done globally, or in a list-specific way.)

Perhaps one of the utilities you mentioned can provide the script or
even much of the MTA and cron interfacing.

The scripting itself can be pretty simple, or it could be medium
complex, depending on how customized the reminder message should be
for a given announcement, and how free-form the announcements are.  In
the simplest case, the reminder message is just the original
announcement message with the Message-ID copied to the In-Reply-To
field and the Message-ID field deleted (either Mailman or the MTA will
add one).

Steve