The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Peter Farmer <address@concealed>]

Rossano,

It certainly is possible. I run a slightly modified Sympa 5.3.2 installation 
with  heavily modified Gui templates to run what is essentially is a 
newsletter configuration (only mailing list owners can send e-mails) with a 
group tagging mechanism (based on sympa's message topic facility - see 
https://www.sympa.org/dev-manual/reception-mode#message_topics ) that 
allows any posted message to be directed to a specific set of subscribers. 
The "tag column" you talk about is the topics_subscriber column in this 
implementation. 

Subscribers are by default subscribed to all receive all messages, but can 
request to receive any arbitrary subset of available 'topics' (or 
alternatively they could be assigned by the list owner transparently to the 
subscriber). I do not use the keyword mechanism in message topic filtering, 
just the topic 'names', which are matched to the contents of a custom smtp 
header injected into the newsletter e-mails before it is posted to the 
Sympa list, or can be selected via the Sympa GUI if it is used to post the 
message. 
Have a look at http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/accounts

It allows people to subscribe to a mailing list to receive updates on Travel 
Advice to various countries issued by the Australian government. They can 
choose which countries they would like to receive updates on (message 
topics) . When an update is made to any countries Travel Advice a message 
is automatically posted to the Sympa list, with the country 'tag' in 
an 'X-Sympa-Topic' smtp header. This activates the filtering capability of 
the message topics facility, delivering the message to only those 
subscribers who requested information on that country. Of course it doesnt 
have to be the user who decides what messages they can recieve. You could 
easily modify the GUI templates and scenarios to allow only administrators 
to create or modify message topic tags.

Cheers,
Peter Farmer


On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:53:03 pm Rossano Lunardi @ NaturaSì wrote:


> we use Sympa 5.3.3 to send about 40.000 newsletter emails every month
> it works greatly but there is a but
> we don't send always our emails to ALL the subscribers: sometimes we need
> to send an email to a specific sub-group
> for example: just to the subscribers living in a certain province
> is it possible to apply a filter to the subscriber list and send just to
> a sub-group?
> It would be great if there would be a 'tag column' in the database
> associated to every email address: in this 'tag column' we would write
> the related key words and then we would use them to filter and send an
> email just to the receivers we wish
> we already read the documentation and we navigated thought the sympa
> menus but we didn't see something like that
> is that possible? Have you already planned to do it?