[Mailman-Users] How to send messages out to only a portion of themembers?

[Mark Sapiro]

Alan McConnell wrote:
>
>First of all, a note of thanks to Mark Sapiro for his wonderful
>command of the mailman SW, _and_ for his great replies.  Only
>those who have read messages on other lists by other experts can
>appreciate how elegantly and enlightenlingly Mr Sapiro formulates
>his answers.


<blush>


>That duty done, to my question:  I should like to be able to
>send messages to a selected partion of a membership and automate
>this procedure if possible.  Example: to send members whose
>dues elapse in month N a reminder in month N - 1.   I am thinking:
>a database of members, paralleling the one kept by mailman, but
>with e.g. subscription information kept in it.
>
>How can this be achieved in mailman?


As Paul Tomblin suggests, you may be able to do this with Topics, but I
think it might be cumbersome especially if there were other subsets
split in different ways. Plus, it relies on the list admin (or some
automated process) maintaining the members' topic subscriptions, and
this is designed to be a member option, not an admin function.

For what it's worth, I do something similar for my cycling club and
don't use Mailman at all. I just use a Python script that is run by
cron, and which accesses the club's membership database directly and
generates emails based on conditions in the member data.

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