Greetings:
I first started using Mailman during the 2000 campaign cycle, when the Nader campaign
put it on their servers, subscribed me to a few of its lists and gave me
administrative responsibilities for [ga-vols] to support my work on that campaign. I
came to request a couple of additional lists from the nader2000 server administrator
before November's election.
Based on that experience, I then recommended it to Cameron Spitzer, administrator for
the Green Internet Society, which provides a few servers at greens.org to the Green
Party movement in this country and around the world. By 2001 or so, he had worked
through his issues with Python and Mailman installation and left me with
administrative authority over a brand new ga.greens.org/mailman installation. I now
provide administartive support for close to twenty lists supporting our local
affiliates, committees and candidate campaigns. We are creating additional lists all
the time.
I write with two specific questions today:
(1) The administrative page for a list permits someone to hold the list back
as private for list subscribers only, or as available to the browsing public, with
anyone able to access its contents. I would love to see a bit more gradiation here.
We have lists that are set up as Members only lists. Our By-laws guarantee sunshine
in the operation of our Party for Party members. I would like to be able to create a
Members only page, where an authenticated member would be able to review and access
lists that are designated as members-only, and which would be as simple to construct
as the ga.greens.org/mailman/listinfo page now is. I imagine that our local
affiliates would also appreciate such a service so that we might have a
ga.greens.org/mailman/members/listinfo and a
ga.greens.org/mailman/members/dekalb/listinfo page as well where authenticated members
of the Dekalb County affiliate might find their local -dx, -annc and various committee
lists, as well as the -news list and any others that would be listed on the public
site.
The idea here is that we wouldn't have to go to the effort of creating another
instance of the server at gagpmembers.greens.org/ or dekalb.gagpmembers.greens.org/,
that we could hide internal lists from the browsing public, but not from our members
and that the state Party's IT team could manage the admin details for the locals,
while still providing additional organization for folks directly accessing the lists
that most interest them.
I would be happy to provide support with review of algorythms, testing and
documentation. Don't know I could be much help with coding. I'm pretty busy as it is
and have only a few thousand lines of perl, php and bash under my belt, with no python
experience whatsoever. Is there any work to provide this sort of functionality
already under way? Might there be any interest in undertaking such a project?
(2) Between administering the ga.greens.org/mailman server itself and
administering perhaps a third or more of the lists hosted there, I get plenty of email
from bounced addresses. It is far more than I can keep up with. I'm looking for a
script that will process an mbox of returned mail, extracting a report of what
addresses bounced what subject lines from what lists on what dates and for what
reasons. Such a report would permit me to quickly parse the results and send them to
individual list administrators and help all of us to know which addresses to
unsubscribe and which addresses to endure until their mail boxes got cleaned out and
started accepting our email again. Including the subject lines would also permit us
to know when an individual needed a phone call to keep them in the loop about a
subject addressed in a bounced message.
I have toyed with scripting this in perl, but have thought that surely I am not the
first person to realize this need, that someone has to have dealt with this issue in
the past and have something I can simply download and install. Any leads on something
which already exists or a project already underway to develop something like this
would be greatly appreciated.
I look forward to hearing back from you soon on this. The 2004 election cycle is upon
us and I expect my email overload to only increase as the months go by. The Mailman
project has already done much to make my life easier with respect to this work load.
But I'd really appreciate any leads on how to address these two issues.
I just added myself to this list, on the daily digest. I would appreciate it if folks
replying to this thread would cc: it directly to me, as well as responding to the list
itself, to help me focus on the list traffic most pertinent to how I can get involved
in supporting Mailman. Thank you all who have contributed so much to building such a
great tool which has been so helpful to our work, building the Georgia Green Party.
-- Hugh Esco
Political Coordinator
Georgia Green Party
_______________________________________________
Mailman-Developers mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
