[Mailman-Users] sending "emergency" message to _all_ subscribers

[Mark Sapiro]

David Gordon wrote:

>Can I override subscribers personal settings ("no mail", "digest") to
>send a message?

No.

>I want to be able to send a message to all subscribers,
>even those who do not receive normal list messages - this is a "one off"
>important administrative message.
>
>I've looked and searched ...
>
>If it's not possible maybe I need to set up a special list for
>announcements only. That's easy enough but would it be possible to use
>the subscription list from my main list as the subscription list for the
>announcement list. ie one subscription list which is accessed by two
>mailing lists?


If you mean set up list-b to have the same membership as list-a and
have the membership of list-b automatically track that of list-a, the
answer is no, but there are things you can do if you have access to
the command line tools.

For a one-off mailing, set up list-b, probably with the same
subject_prefix as list-a, and also advertised=No and
default_member_moderation=Yes so members can't post, especially if you
will keep the list. Then use bin/list_members to make a file of
list-a's members and bin/add_members to add them to list-b.

If you wish to keep list-b for a possible future mailing, next time use
bin/list_members to get list-a's members and bin/synch_members to
update list-b. Or, you could do the first mailing and then use
bin/remove_members to remove everyone from list-b to be sure no posts
leak through, and then bin/add_members to add them back the next time.

If you don't have access to the command line, you can script the web
interface to get the members of list-a and mass subscribe them to
list-b. See
<http://starship.python.net/crew/jwt/mailman/#throughtheweb> for a
sample script.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan