[Mailman-Users] Personalized Emails

[Dan Mick]

> Okay, I basically know what to do for this however I'm having trouble
> finding mailman's support for it (if existant).  I am sending out a
> large corporate email and would like to to be personalized.  I have
> made a perl script to replace all instances of %FULLNAME% with the
> appropriate name from our database.. However, I'm having trouble
> finding out whether I can get mailman to pipe each piece of mail it
> sends out (it wont work via /etc/aliases, that only receives the
> post, doesn't send it) through this script so that the mail can be
> sent personalized.. If anyone has any clue on how I might do this, I
> would greatly appreciate it!

No; this is basically not what a mailing-list manager
does.  MLMs use the economies of scale: make one message, and ship
it to a bunch of people.  You want to ship a different message to
every person, so there's no "broadcast" aspect involved; it's just
a bunch of individual mails, one after another, with similar content.

For this, sendmail is just fine (assuming you're using sendmail),
or even something like "mail" or "mailx" usually supports the '-t'
switch to take To: from the file.  If you just create a file
in /tmp, say, with:

To: $user@$address
Subject: Your Personal Message

Dear $fullname:

Here's a message just for you; it was sent to $user@$address.

in it, and then use something like "mailx -t /tmp/mailmsg", 
it will go where you want (assuming you process it by substituting
the $ variables).  I do this to send reminders to people who
have their mail set to "nomail" on Mailman.

Check out the mailx/mail/sendmail doc on your system.