[Mailman-Users] Integrating mailman with customer data

[Mark Sapiro]

David wrote:
>
>Can anyone suggest a better way to find examples and more help for syncing
>Mailman with external customer data?


Basically, you have to do the heavy lifting. Mailman's bin/sync_members
tool is what you use to actually sync the list's membership with your
database, but you first have to extract the address and display name
information from the database and create a flat file with one user per
line in one of the formats described in the FAQ at
<http://wiki.list.org/x/YoA9>. Then you can use bin/sync_members to
synchronize the list membership with that file.


>One thing we would like to do is efficiently update Mailman based on any
>feedback loop reports we get. We also get a lot of support requests for
>Mailman subscription changes. Our members are not technical and often they
>cannot unsubscribe themselves from Mailman, so we do it for them.


If you reflect those things in your database, you can then extract and
use bin/sync_members.


>We need to make our process of tracking all these change requests and
>updating Mailman more efficient. (We currently keep an Excel spreadsheet
>that tracks all these change requests and we update Mailman manually, but
>that method is *very* unsatisfactory.)


You could process subscribe requests with bin/add_members and unsubs
with bin/remove_members if that works better than sync_members, but
you still have to produce the lists of members to add/remove.


>Another goal is to keep a member
>database that gives us some reporting capabilities (e.g., ability to track
>percentage of unsubscribe requests, etc.).


That would be totally outside Mailman, but it could generate input to
the *_members tools.

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