On Fri, 23 May 2008, Dyer, Renata wrote:
I am keen on finding out whether there are libraries out there that have
developed a good way to manage email alerts your library is subscribed
to.
Our library is subscribed to around 130 email alerts that are delivered
to our inbox. Many of these emails need to be actioned in different
ways. In some cases, a staff member needs to save an electronic file
and add it to the collection. In other cases, an email is generated
and forwarded to the group of clients. There are lots of small steps
involved in managing each one of those alerts and the whole area has
become quite challenging to manage over the time.
[trimmed]
Do you use a system/software to manage these alerts? Or just to manage
the distribution list if required? If no, do you know of any (preferably
open source) that can do the job?
I appreciate any experience you may be willing to share.
I don't have your exact situation, but as a sytem administrator, I make
heavy use of procmail filters to sort and process my incoming e-mail.
http://www.procmail.org/
I've used it over the years for filtering spam, sorting mailing lists to
separate folders, updating web pages via e-mail. Procmail can pass
messages off to other programs for processing (eg, 'formail', which is
used to re-write mail headers).
If your mail server is a unix-varient or linux, and you're not using
procmail as your local mail delivery agent, you can always add:
"|/path/to/procmail -f-"
in your .forward to make use of it.
If you're running a Windows varient for a mail server, or don't have
access to the mail server to install filters ... I'd probably try using
fetchmail to pull the mail to a server where I could then reprocess it.
-----
Joe Hourcle
Principal Software Engineer
Solar Data Analysis Center
Goddard Space Flight Center
