[Mailman-Developers] MM feature request - spread out the pain

[skip at pobox.com]

    >> In fact, it is quite easy to argue that with a programmatic interface
    >> and access to cron my "spread out the pain" request is better
    >> implemented there.

    Stephen> "There" being in Mailman itself?  Or in cron?  (It's not
    Stephen> obvious to me whether Mailman could do this better internally
    Stephen> or not; of course I'd try to do it in cron before looking for a
    Stephen> feature in Mailman, but Jack's mileage would vary, I'm
    Stephen> sure. :-)

In cron via a web services api of some sort.

    >> The monthly mailing becomes a daily mailing which only sends reminder
    >> notices to a fraction of the users.

    Stephen> Indeed, or weekly, or even 4x daily, and providing that kind of
    Stephen> flexibility of timing is something that cron has a lot of
    Stephen> existing support for.  OTOH, somebody still has to write the
    Stephen> code to manage the partial lists.  However, that code might be
    Stephen> useful for other purposes (eg, if a user who refers to the
    Stephen> member list page often wants it split into 4 equal-sized pages
    Stephen> rather than 27 pages of wildly varying size).  (The above is
    Stephen> what I mean by "generic features", and an example of how they
    Stephen> might be applied.)

In my original post I wrote the selector I would use to determine which day
of the month an email was to get a notice:

    ord(email[0]) % 28 + 1

Assuming you can pull the current list members from an API you select those
whose first letter matches the current day of the month. (*)

Now, as to actually performing this experiment, I find starting up Mailman a
rather high barrier simply because you have to create and populate a mailing
list.  How do people generally go about doing that?  Do you just create a
bunch of dummy aliases which map to a single address?

Skip

(*) In the Apocryphal Bible we find these extra two verses:

Genesis 2

...

4 And on the 29th, 30th and 31st days of the month the Moderator rested from
all the labors to which he had been assigned by the Administrator.

5 And the Administrator blessed the 29th, 30th and 31st days of the month
and sanctified them by pulling a beer from the cooler.