Greetings:
I first started using Mailman during the 2000 campaign cycle, when the Nader campaign put it on their servers, subscribed me to a few of its lists and gave me administrative responsibilities for [ga-vols] to support my work on that campaign. I came to request a couple of additional lists from the nader2000 server administrator before November's election.
Based on that experience, I then recommended it to Cameron Spitzer, administrator for the Green Internet Society, which provides a few servers at greens.org to the Green Party movement in this country and around the world. By 2001 or so, he had worked through his issues with Python and Mailman installation and left me with administrative authority over a brand new ga.greens.org/mailman installation. I now provide administartive support for close to twenty lists supporting our local affiliates, committees and candidate campaigns. We are creating additional lists all the time.
I write with two specific questions today:
(1) The administrative page for a list permits someone to hold the list back as private for list subscribers only, or as available to the browsing public, with anyone able to access its contents. I would love to see a bit more gradiation here. We have lists that are set up as Members only lists. Our By-laws guarantee sunshine in the operation of our Party for Party members. I would like to be able to create a Members only page, where an authenticated member would be able to review and access lists that are designated as members-only, and which would be as simple to construct as the ga.greens.org/mailman/listinfo page now is. I imagine that our local affiliates would also appreciate such a service so that we might have a ga.greens.org/mailman/members/listinfo and a ga.greens.org/mailman/members/dekalb/listinfo page as well where authenticated members of the Dekalb County affiliate might find their local -dx, -annc and various committee lists, as well as the -news list and any others that would be listed on the public site. The idea here is that we wouldn't have to go to the effort of creating another instance of the server at gagpmembers.greens.org/ or dekalb.gagpmembers.greens.org/, that we could hide internal lists from the browsing public, but not from our members and that the state Party's IT team could manage the admin details for the locals, while still providing additional organization for folks directly accessing the lists that most interest them.
I would be happy to provide support with review of algorythms, testing and documentation. Don't know I could be much help with coding. I'm pretty busy as it is and have only a few thousand lines of perl, php and bash under my belt, with no python experience whatsoever. Is there any work to provide this sort of functionality already under way? Might there be any interest in undertaking such a project?
(2) Between administering the ga.greens.org/mailman server itself and administering perhaps a third or more of the lists hosted there, I get plenty of email from bounced addresses. It is far more than I can keep up with. I'm looking for a script that will process an mbox of returned mail, extracting a report of what addresses bounced what subject lines from what lists on what dates and for what reasons. Such a report would permit me to quickly parse the results and send them to individual list administrators and help all of us to know which addresses to unsubscribe and which addresses to endure until their mail boxes got cleaned out and started accepting our email again. Including the subject lines would also permit us to know when an individual needed a phone call to keep them in the loop about a subject addressed in a bounced message. I have toyed with scripting this in perl, but have thought that surely I am not the first person to realize this need, that someone has to have dealt with this issue in the past and have something I can simply download and install. Any leads on something which already exists or a project already underway to develop something like this would be greatly appreciated.
I look forward to hearing back from you soon on this. The 2004 election cycle is upon us and I expect my email overload to only increase as the months go by. The Mailman project has already done much to make my life easier with respect to this work load. But I'd really appreciate any leads on how to address these two issues.
I just added myself to this list, on the daily digest. I would appreciate it if folks replying to this thread would cc: it directly to me, as well as responding to the list itself, to help me focus on the list traffic most pertinent to how I can get involved in supporting Mailman. Thank you all who have contributed so much to building such a great tool which has been so helpful to our work, building the Georgia Green Party.
-- Hugh Esco Political Coordinator Georgia Green Party