[Mailman-Users] questions about your software

[Jon Carnes]

> I'm researching possible software to use to manage all of the listserves
> our office has.  One of the options software I've found that I can buy
> has is the ability to query users from a database.  Can Mailman software
> do this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Erin
>
The answer is yes and no.  The current version stores the user in a 
database, so Yes it can and does query a database for its users.
  --  Hay, you give *no* details and this is the kind of info you get back. 
 Alright!?!  --

You probably have a database of users that you would like to access, well 
you can easily use that database with Mailman.  Your DB guy would write a 
structured query that dumped out the mailing addresses to a text list and 
then you would run a command from Mailman called "sync_members" to 
syncronize each list with the database dump.

Of course you would automate this so that it was triggered by something (a 
database update or simply every hour).  It works fine. 

BTW: future releases of Mailman will be able to directly use your existing 
database.  The current release needs to use this "bridged" effect.  If you 
look very closely at other MLM's you will see that they use the same 
process for sync-ing with an existing database.

Good luck in your quest.

Jon Carnes