I am in the process of setting up a read-only mailing list. Because the list should be read-only, I have set it to require approval for all posts.
The list is to be a daily joke, sent out once a day.
I would like to set up a cron job to send each day's message. How do I send a message from the local machine which doesn't require administrative approval?
My first though was to define an address that is allowed to post without approval, and then forge that address from the cron job. However, anyone who figured out the address could then post from any machine.
My preference is to set up the list security, so unapproved messages can only be sent by a program running directly on the mailman host machine. This should provide more security to prevent unwanted posts. I would then have the daily cron job queue that day's message using the program.
Is this possible? Is it easy? Am I better off just relying on using a secret address for the sender?
I am using mailman 1.1 on a Solaris 7 machine.
-Thanks Michael Fryd
-- +-----------------------------------------------------+ jokes at: <URL:http://www.randomjoke.com/>
Michael E. Fryd http://michael.fryd.com/ Neuco Image Group, Inc. e-mail: mfryd@neucoimage.com 523 Michigan Avenue Phone: (305) 673-5200 Miami Beach, FL 33139-6317 Fax: (305) 673-2950
+-----------------------------------------------------+ jokes at: <URL:http://www.randomjoke.com/>
Michael E. Fryd http://michael.fryd.com/ Neuco Image Group, Inc. e-mail: mfryd@neucoimage.com 523 Michigan Avenue Phone: (305) 673-5200 Miami Beach, FL 33139-6317 Fax: (305) 673-2950
I think I might just use a Perl script, a text file of emails and a cron job for this rather than Mailman.... If you're just going to send an email out once a day seems like Mailman's a bit on the "big" side....The Perl script could even generate an archive of old emails fairly easily.
Mark Herzog
The list is to be a daily joke, sent out once a day.
I have about 10 thousand visitors to my web site each day, and have already gotten hundreds of unsolicited requests asking me to set up a list.
I expect the list to have 5 to 10 thousand members. With that many subscribers I need automation.
My goal is to use Mailman to handle:
- subscribe/un-subscribe requests via the web
- detection and removal of bad addresses (bounced mail)
- maintaining the subscriber list and keeping it secret
- protecting the subscriber list so that only the official daily messages get sent.
My thought was to try to use these features from an existing package like Mailman, disabling the features I don't need, rather than building a system from scratch.
As for archiving, it's a feature I don't need. I have an existing web site with all the material already available.
-Michael
-- +-----------------------------------------------------+ jokes at: <URL:http://www.randomjoke.com/>
Michael E. Fryd http://michael.fryd.com/ Neuco Image Group, Inc. e-mail: mfryd@neucoimage.com 523 Michigan Avenue Phone: (305) 673-5200 Miami Beach, FL 33139-6317 Fax: (305) 673-2950
On Sat, Mar 25, 2000 at 10:50:44PM -0500, Michael E. Fryd wrote:
MM does that
MM does that
MM does that -- Privacy options: Who can view subscription list? Admin only
MM does that -- Privacy options: Must posts be approved by an administrator? Yes
-- Ralf Hildebrandt <R.Hildebrandt@tu-bs.de> www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb I trust Microsoft. I trust them to be spectacularly unable to get anything right, including and especially hard things like large-scale industrial espionage. Sure, they'll make clownish, clumsy stabs at it and fail in predictable, amusing and embarassing ways, and then do it all over again. And their victi^H^H users will not only forgive them but spend a lot of energy making up excuses for them.
Am 26.03.2000 um 14:06:10 +0200 schrieb Ralf Hildebrandt folgendes:
Or alternatively -- add some prohibitions in your MTA which disallow posting to that address except for localhost or something...
-- Ralf Hildebrandt <R.Hildebrandt@tu-bs.de> www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
Hmm, perhaps the answer is to do a hybrid of a "roll your own" and a mailman thing?
By that I mean, let mailman manage your subscriber list, blah blah blah, but write a few lines of python code which will simply lookup the subscriber list for a given mailman list and do a massmail to them. I'm not a mailman source hacker, so I have no idea, but one would assume that the high level tools are already built in the source of such an OO-designed thing, such that you'd be able to do something like
<bcc list> = <lookup the subscribers of "foobiz"> <body> = <open and read some input file with today's joke> <send mail(<from>, <subject>, <body>, <bcc list>)>
Then you stick that in cron. You can still post via the "real" list mechanism and approve it, which is all good for things like administrivia or announcing the birth of your son.
Now, if you were planning on maintaining a mailing list archive (like pipermail or something) this script would need to also file a copy in the mbox file for the list, using whatever calls the normal mailman delivery code does.
jim showing that he's a functional programmer trying to make amends =)
PS Such a contraption would be a great thing for someone to write and include in Mailman as a "contrib" item of some sort...
On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Michael E. Fryd wrote:
I think I might just use a Perl script, a text file of emails and a cron job for this rather than Mailman.... If you're just going to send an email out once a day seems like Mailman's a bit on the "big" side....The Perl script could even generate an archive of old emails fairly easily.
Mark Herzog
The list is to be a daily joke, sent out once a day.
I have about 10 thousand visitors to my web site each day, and have already gotten hundreds of unsolicited requests asking me to set up a list.
I expect the list to have 5 to 10 thousand members. With that many subscribers I need automation.
My goal is to use Mailman to handle:
- subscribe/un-subscribe requests via the web
- detection and removal of bad addresses (bounced mail)
- maintaining the subscriber list and keeping it secret
- protecting the subscriber list so that only the official daily messages get sent.
My thought was to try to use these features from an existing package like Mailman, disabling the features I don't need, rather than building a system from scratch.
As for archiving, it's a feature I don't need. I have an existing web site with all the material already available.
-Michael
-- +-----------------------------------------------------+ jokes at: <URL:http://www.randomjoke.com/>
Michael E. Fryd http://michael.fryd.com/ Neuco Image Group, Inc. e-mail: mfryd@neucoimage.com 523 Michigan Avenue Phone: (305) 673-5200 Miami Beach, FL 33139-6317 Fax: (305) 673-2950
On Sat, Mar 25, 2000 at 10:50:44PM -0500, Michael E. Fryd wrote:
MM does that
MM does that
MM does that -- Privacy options: Who can view subscription list? Admin only
MM does that -- Privacy options: Must posts be approved by an administrator? Yes
-- Ralf Hildebrandt <R.Hildebrandt@tu-bs.de> www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb I trust Microsoft. I trust them to be spectacularly unable to get anything right, including and especially hard things like large-scale industrial espionage. Sure, they'll make clownish, clumsy stabs at it and fail in predictable, amusing and embarassing ways, and then do it all over again. And their victi^H^H users will not only forgive them but spend a lot of energy making up excuses for them.
Am 26.03.2000 um 14:06:10 +0200 schrieb Ralf Hildebrandt folgendes:
Or alternatively -- add some prohibitions in your MTA which disallow posting to that address except for localhost or something...
-- Ralf Hildebrandt <R.Hildebrandt@tu-bs.de> www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
Hmm, perhaps the answer is to do a hybrid of a "roll your own" and a mailman thing?
By that I mean, let mailman manage your subscriber list, blah blah blah, but write a few lines of python code which will simply lookup the subscriber list for a given mailman list and do a massmail to them. I'm not a mailman source hacker, so I have no idea, but one would assume that the high level tools are already built in the source of such an OO-designed thing, such that you'd be able to do something like
<bcc list> = <lookup the subscribers of "foobiz"> <body> = <open and read some input file with today's joke> <send mail(<from>, <subject>, <body>, <bcc list>)>
Then you stick that in cron. You can still post via the "real" list mechanism and approve it, which is all good for things like administrivia or announcing the birth of your son.
Now, if you were planning on maintaining a mailing list archive (like pipermail or something) this script would need to also file a copy in the mbox file for the list, using whatever calls the normal mailman delivery code does.
jim showing that he's a functional programmer trying to make amends =)
PS Such a contraption would be a great thing for someone to write and include in Mailman as a "contrib" item of some sort...
On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Michael E. Fryd wrote:
participants (4)
-
Jim Hebert -
Mark Herzog -
Michael E. Fryd -
Ralf Hildebrandt