The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

Sometimes, I need to email all list owners on our list server, such as to inform them of a scheduled outage or new features.

 

To do this, I’ve set up a Sympa mailing list that uses a SQL external datasource to define its membership as being all list owners; I have then used the exclude list to exclude myself from it.

 

Here’s how to set up the external datasource:

 

include_sql_query

name list_owners

db_name sympa

passwd XXXXXX

db_type mysql

user sympa

sql_query SELECT DISTINCT `user_admin` FROM `admin_table` WHERE `role_admin` = 'owner' order by `user_admin`

db_port 3306

host localhost

 

The passwd setting is the db_passwd from your sympa.conf; db_user, db_type, db_host and db_name are also in there though I’ve used the default values here as most people will have done.

 

You may also want to add “AND `reception_admin` = ‘mail’ “ to the sql_query, in case you want to exclude admins with nomail set.

sql_query SELECT DISTINCT `user_admin` FROM `admin_table` WHERE `role_admin` = 'owner' AND `reception_admin` = 'mail' order by `user_admin`

 

This external datasource now means I have a list that will reliably email all list owners at any particular time.  I’ve also set mailmerge on the list, and have a custom attribute to hold the list of listnames for which they are owner; however to keep that in synch I’ve had to resort to an external script that I run nightly.  It does, however, let me email people using mailmerge to give them the list of lists for which they are owner, in case they have forgotten.

 

Hope someone finds this useful… comments and feedback welcome.

 

Steve

 

Steve Shipway

University of Auckland

UNIX Systems Design Team Lead

address@concealed

+64 (9) 3737 599 ext 86487

 

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