[Mailman-Users] Newbie Questions

[Jon Carnes]

On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 15:44, Larry Hansford wrote:
> At 02:57 PM 2/7/2003, you wrote:
> >Finally - one question about the features of Mailman.  Is it possible to
> >set up a "mail merge" (like with MS Word or other word processing
> >software) so that I could put something like :firstname: in the outgoing
> >mail and have Mailman replace it with its stored First name for that
> >address (basically to personalize the outgoing message).
>

To continue where Larry left off, You can run Mailman in Personalization
mode in which it can substitute the persons name for a variable that you
use in the Mail's header or footer.  

The Personalization aspects of Mailman are minimal as this is the first
version (v 2.1.0) that has included personalization, user names (as
opposed to simply email addresses), and VERP style troubleshooting.

If you don't find that Mailman doesn't meet your needs as well as you
think it should, then feel free to drop up to Sourceforge.net and add
some suggested changes and features. Detailed examples of requests (and
the code to carry them out) are welcome at all Open Source projects.

Also, the code is Open and available so it is easy for you to hack into
and add or extend any functionality that you need.  This is part of the
way that Open Source projects grow.

Aside: The part that is still missing from Mailman is an SQL connector. 
Once that is in place then it will be very easy to add all sorts of
personalization variables - allowing you to run mail merges that are the
envy of Marketing groups the world-over!

Take care - Jon Carnes