On Sunday, June 3, 2001, at 07:27 AM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
I asked this before, but I don't remember you weighing in, and I suspect you might have something useful to say...
I'm trying to get Mailman to behave itself as a *broadcast* list manager (rather than for discussion), and I need to throttle the *actual mail* that way (x thousand per day).
Where might be the best place to put something like that?
Good question -- I don't use mailman for this, all of my broadcast work is with a custom front-end, and it usually talks to bulk_mailer on the back end, and I build the rate limiting into a custom version of bulk_mailer.
I'm not sure how I'd do this with mailman; you really need to be able to pull subsets of subscriber data out in a reproducible format, and keep track of a highwater mark so you can restart delivery from the next address. I'm sure you could do something with the cli scripting, but you end up doing most of the work outside of mailman, including delivery, so you end up with basically a custom setup.
What I'd do in this case is add a uniq id flag to the database, so I could teach mailman to "mail 4000 messages in list foo starting with id 1", and then track what the last one did, and iterate nightly until everyone's delivery. Something like that. It isn't too complicated, but it requires keeping a lot more state than mailman is set up to keep. but -- thinking about it -- if this were set up as a generalized functionality for lists, then password reminders then becomes an instance of this functionality, not a specialty mailing or a custom program like mailpasswd. you simply schedule a password reminder into this subsystem via cron then....
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