The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

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Dear Sympa Folks,

We're planning on moving off our our creaky old ListProc MLM and
moving to something with a web interface and an active community.
So far Sympa is far and away my leading candidate.

I was hoping somebody could describe, in broad terms, how Sympa
could be used as a back-end for doing mailings to one-time use
distribution lists.  Here's the scenario:

   The sender will identify the desired demographic, say "left
   handed liberal arts majors with blue eyes", by creating a
   WHERE clause that selects those folks from our Student
   Information System.  (We use a commercial product called
   Banner that sits on an Oracle DB engine.)

   So what I'll have to work with are unique user IDs which I can
   then turn into a set names and e-mail addresses that exist in
   our various e-mail and alias systems.  And of course I'll be
   handed a message to be distributed and the e-mail address of
   the sender.  After this particular list is built and the
   message has been sent, that particular demographic may not
   ever be used again.

   Finally, there is the possibility that I would have the unique
   ID, name, and e-mail address for all possible users stored in
   an LDAP.  But the LDAP would contain no other selector
   information, such as eye color.  :-)   In other words the
   demographic selection process would always have to be made in
   Oracle.

Now as a point of comparison, here is how I currently handle the
above situation with ListProc:

   I have a standing generic list, configured for one-way
   announcements, let's call it "UNH.Announce".  I use a Perl
   script to take the IDs and map them to names/e-mail addresses
   and use that data to build a flat file subscribe list in the
   exact format that ListProc builds for itself.  I then run a
   command that causes ListProc to re-cache the list.  I make the
   sender the temporary owner of the list (to have exclusive
   posting permission), post the message as that user, and then
   flip the ownership back and zero out the list to prevent
   accidental re-use.

I imagine that I could probably do more or less the same with
Sympa.  I've been lurking here long enough to know that Sympa
still supports it's original flat-file subscriber list format, so
I figure I could use the same trick as I'm doing with ListProc.
But I'm wondering what other, smarter methods, could be used
given Sympa's many features and interfaces (SOAP, LDAP, SQL,
etc. etc.).

Thanks in advance for any insights.  And to all here's wishing
you a safe and happy holidays.

                                                    ...BC

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| Bill Costa                                       |  No good
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|   University of New Hampshire                    |  Goes
| Durham, NH  03824       USA                      |   unpunished.
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