--On 21 June 2006 23:45:49 +0100 Matthew Newton <mcn4@leicester.ac.uk> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 01:37:36PM -0400, emf wrote:
How about this for extra:
- Display a list of ALL members - just their names and addresses.
- Delete ALL the list members with one click - OK, and maybe a confirm dialog!
Perhaps something that might be more appropriate would be a "member differ", wherein you upload a list of email addresses, and it shows you the list of emails that were on the list but aren't now, and those that would be added, and gives you the option to either accept all the changes or selectively modify them.
This sounds like the command-line "sync_members" program. I've been meaning to add a web interface to that for a while, but haven't managed to get around to it.
Yes, that's exactly it. In fact, I use sync_members to sync some student and staff lists with our personnel database. However, there are some lists that need to be synced occasionally with - for example - excel spreadsheets that belong to people without access to our servers.
I guess it depends on what you use Mailman for. In then general internet-user-subscribes-themselves-mailing-list it's great. For a University with central management of some lists, it isn't quite what is needed all the time.
One thing that happens each year here for some lists is that all list members of "course-year2" get moved to "course-year3", "course-year1" to "course-year2", and new members added to "course-year1". I can do this easily from the command line with a "list_members | sync_members", but I'd really prefer the owners to be able to do it themselves.
Another way of managing that is to name the lists after the year that the student enrolled. For example course-2004, course-2005. That way you only need to handle the occasional student who suspends studies for a year, or something. If you like, you can create aliases (in your MTA config) like course-year1 for the list names and just move the pointers at the relevant time.
Which reminds me, another thing I've been wanting to add is "download members as text file" (basically the same as 1 above), which would go together with the sync_members option.
Matthew
-- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex