Forum OpenACS Q&A: List Software solution for email from OpenACS

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1: List Software solution for email from OpenACS
Posted by Bob OConnor on 09/29/01 05:02 PM

For now, I'm abandoning the track in my thread:
ns_sendmail CR/LF lost in some messages
https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0002jp

What I'd like to do, until the full migration to v4 and acs-mail etc.. which, by the way, looks good, is to find a simple/good mail list program that I can use to do the following:

  • Write a select email, ...etc, mail loop to get the email addresses and add 'em to a text file.
  • Copy file to proper mail list location
  • Let the mail list program send the messages.
  • This is automatic so the superuser only needs to hit the send button.
  • After complete, this mail list would be deleted and recreated the next time because people opt in/out and that is a DB flag.
  • Mail list to handle bounces so that they do NOT go to the sender.

I look forward to ideas and recommendations for list software that would integrate well with OpenACS. Thank you.

-Bob

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2: Response to List Software solution for email from OpenACS (response to 1)
Posted by Jerry Asher on 09/29/01 06:12 PM
Hi Bob,

I wonder if:

  • ezmlm (http://www.ezmlm.org/) fits your needs. An integration package of some sort would need to be written between the ACS and ezmlm, but uh, I shouldn't think that would be too difficult.

    It's a dedicated mailing list manager written by Daniel Bernstein (who qrote qmail). It powers all sorts of "ez" mailing lists and knows how to both handle bounces and subscribe/unsubscribe users all by itself. (It would be very nice to integrate ezmlm's subscriptions with the ACS db alert system.)

  • there is some way just to use qmail itself (or I think you're using postfix? (so some native postfix method?) to do what you want.

    With qmail for instance, you could bypass ns_sendmail entirely, and just use native qmail commands to "inject" (qmail's terminology) a message into the queue. I know that qmail is supposed to be both very efficient and very smart about how it handles one message going to multiple recipients, so the end result should be that you can get your bulk mail out with neither an outlook CR/LF problem, nor requiring excessive resources from your system.

    Without a bit of work, might not handle bounces correctly, although if I recall, very little handles bounces correctly due to ambiguities of headers and the way user's mail programs treat those headers.

Hmm. Now that I've written this, I have this feeling of deja-vu, I think we've participated in this same conversation about six months to a year ago. It's too bad we haven't made any progress on this....
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3: Response to List Software solution for email from OpenACS (response to 1)
Posted by Bob OConnor on 09/30/01 04:58 AM
Yes, it's true Jerry, we did discuss this awhile back....

We have resisted installing qmail because our sysadmin couldn't get it working and preferred to use postfix... But after wandering around the net today and looking at documentation maybe qmail is the RIGHT program for doing all the stuff any OPENacs person would want....