Scott Chapman <mail@scottechapman.com> wrote:

Is there a way to programmatically manage th members of a list?

I am am managing a club, where we track current and former membership in a database. One wouldlike to b able to send an email to all the current members, but that requires a SQL query.

Is there a way for me to do this? Thanks in advance!

I do it every day. Once a day, for some of my lists, someone creates a file of subscribers; this comes from a database. I have cron jobs that take each (possibly changed) file and run

 ./sync_members -w=no -g=no -d=no -a=no -f  filename  $listname

This will quietly synchronize the membership list. I get the output of the cron, so I can keep track of who was unsubscribed and who was subscribed. One problem - if an address in the database is incorrect, then the subscriber address will be unsubscribed eventually by Mailman at the end of its bounce processing. If the bad address has not been corrected, it will be re-subscribed the next time the cron job is run.

My script does some other processing, as I allow for static entries (persons automatically subscribed to a list even though they are not in the database).

Barry S. Finkel Computing and Information Systems Division Argonne National Laboratory Phone: +1 (630) 252-7277 9700 South Cass Avenue Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601 Building 222, Room D209 Internet: BSFinkel@anl.gov Argonne, IL 60439-4828 IBMMAIL: I1004994