David Gordon wrote:

Can I override subscribers personal settings ("no mail", "digest") to send a message?

No.

I want to be able to send a message to all subscribers, even those who do not receive normal list messages - this is a "one off" important administrative message.

I've looked and searched ...

If it's not possible maybe I need to set up a special list for announcements only. That's easy enough but would it be possible to use the subscription list from my main list as the subscription list for the announcement list. ie one subscription list which is accessed by two mailing lists?

If you mean set up list-b to have the same membership as list-a and have the membership of list-b automatically track that of list-a, the answer is no, but there are things you can do if you have access to the command line tools.

For a one-off mailing, set up list-b, probably with the same subject_prefix as list-a, and also advertised=No and default_member_moderation=Yes so members can't post, especially if you will keep the list. Then use bin/list_members to make a file of list-a's members and bin/add_members to add them to list-b.

If you wish to keep list-b for a possible future mailing, next time use bin/list_members to get list-a's members and bin/synch_members to update list-b. Or, you could do the first mailing and then use bin/remove_members to remove everyone from list-b to be sure no posts leak through, and then bin/add_members to add them back the next time.

If you don't have access to the command line, you can script the web interface to get the members of list-a and mass subscribe them to list-b. See <http://starship.python.net/crew/jwt/mailman/#throughtheweb> for a sample script.

-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan