[Mailman-Developers] an impossible need to address ?

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jan 22, 2016, at 02:27 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>> database. It means a way (1) to set-up scores of same style mailing 
>> lists and (2) for a person being a member of my directory to easiliy 
>> select the lists she wants to attend or quit.

Just another bit of Mailman 3 obscurity: there is a handler called
'file-recipients' which can be used to populate a message's recipient list
from a static file.  It looks on the file system, inside the mailing list's
data directory for a members.txt file.  If found, this can contain one email
address per line which is used as the recipient list for the message.

Of course, you need file system access to edit this file because it's not
currently available via REST, and thus not available to Postorius.

A few things could make this nicer:

* Expose the file to REST so that it can be updated via Postorius
* Use 'parseaddr' style lines so that they can contain anything parseable by
  the email.utils.parseaddr() function
* Allow it to augment any other recipient list already calculated, instead of
  short-circuiting when any other recipient list is already present
* Add file-recipients to the default pipeline handler list

Contributions welcome of course.

Cheers,
-Barry