[okfn-help] Mailing list management

Fri Nov 26 17:52:45 GMT 2010

This is fantastic Adam! I'm cc'ing okfn-help so others can see your suggestions.

Re: (1) below, one thing that I think could be worth doing is trying
to ensure OKF list members are on the main OKF announce list. Is there
any obvious automated way of doing this? Any chance you might be able
to help? ;-)

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Adam McGreggor <adam at amyl.org.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 03:58:10PM +0100, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>> There's not much that needs doing,
>
> super ;)
>
>> but I think we'd benefit from your
>> input and any ideas about how we could do things better.
>
> Ok...
>
>> E.g. I've been wondering for ages about how we might have some way of
>> sending messages to multiple lists, and making sure that people don't
>> get lots of copies of the same message?
>
> There are a couple of ways of doing this; none of which involve
> cross-posting ;)
>
> (1) dynamically building a mega-list from each relevant 'subsidiary'
>    list, eliminating duplicious email addresses (although, this won't
>    catch adam-okfn at amyl.org.uk and adam-wdmmg at amyl.org.uk, for example,
>    although that *could* be implemented...);
>
> (2) sibling lists
>
> (3) relying on some Exim/MTA ('mail server') magic.
>
> I don't think there's a magic solution to the multiple-postings in
> Mailman 3 (still in alpha/being developed); at least not one that I've
> seen.
>
> Of those, (1) is my prefered option, mainly because the
> digest/non-digest settings can be migrated/included -- although, for
> an announcement list, having digests is often undesirable. The 'mega
> list' can either be another Mailman list, or one used just by the
> mail-server; although with the latter, the automatic headers/footers
> won't be included. Unsubscriptions *can* be tricky, too, but there are
> work-arounds.
>
> (2) generally works pretty well, although the caveat for non-digest
> members is a bit tricky; it's relatively easy to pull the amount of
> addresses on digest, progmatically, to give an idea of how many
> subscribers are on digests (which could be quite useful).
>
> (3) should really use a database, a (pair of) log file(s), and
> logic/condition statements. It's a terrible hack, and has the
> over-head of reading/writing to ancilliary files, but can be a very
> effective way of doing things. Bounce handling (one of the
> strong-points of Mailing List software) can be a bit tricky
> too, but generally, if there's a bounce, it's the address that's
> wrong, or there's a transient error (mailbox quotas, usually).
>
> Does that make sense?
>
> --
> "You've got to remember most anarchists don't get up that early"
>    -- Tony Harris, (chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority,
>   describing events during the morning of May Day 2001)
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

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