On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, D.M.Chapman wrote:
> We are finally going down the route of an all-staff and an all-student
> email list (the acceptability of this can be argued elsewhere - I am
> "argued out" :-).
Sorry for adding more there, but one piece of advice is to get someone in
management to moderate the list. You really don't want the job of
deciding what goes and what doesn't and then having your decisions
appealed over your head. Just make sure that the moderator fully
understands that attachments and large messages really don't belong.
> We have an admin database that manages all of our accounts and holds info
> on the status of the user. Ideally, we would like to get exim to send to
> a list of users that it obtains from this database.
How current does the list need to be? Do you really need to pull the
addresses from the live database? If not, just run a nightly script that
generates the lists in a form that your mailing list manager (majordomo or
mailman) can cope with.
This obviates the need for any of your three options you thought about.
> An improvement on this would be to allow email to all-students-1@???
> to result in our binary being run with the suffix being passed to it to
> allow the search to be restricted in someway ( -1 meaning year 1, -2 meaning
> year 2 students for example). This would allow a simple way to limit the
> recipients and would hopefully reduce the number of students complaining
> that the info that we are spamming them with is not applicable to their
> year/course/whatever.
You could play with suffixes, or, as I said you could just regenerate all
of these lists nightly. The same script that generates those could
generate the appropriate alaises file for exim to use.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg
I have recently moved, see
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/contact.html
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
