On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:15:31 +0100, Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>This functionality has been in the product since 1999. You can create a DISTRIBUTE job going to recipients selected on the basis of their subscription flags (digest and so on) and/or of an arbitrary boolean expression that can (among other things) match the recipient's e-mail address to patterns. This feature was a complete flop because it took the form of a bland page in the web interface with checkboxes for digest and so on, an input field where you could type a pattern-matching expression, and a text box where you could type whatever you wanted to tell your subscribers. The feedback was that this was too complicated to use. People wanted to do this from their regular mail client, not form a Spartan web page. They just wanted LISTSERV to magically open an additional dialog box at the most appropriate place for their particular mail client and version. Unfortunately, I did not know how to program that :-) The feature is still in LISTSERV, not sure about the web interface though. If
>it disappeared with the 15.0 overhaul, we could probably add it back.

This functionality does still exist in LISTSERV.  I considered posting about
this when the question was first asked.  However, I decided that it would not
be useful for most Owners at most LISTSERV sites, due to permissions issues.
Permission to send a DISTRIBUTE job is limited at most sites to POSTMASTERs
(Site Admins) only.  This leaves out most List Owners.  :-/

The Site Admin can grant privileges to Owners to send DISTRIBUTE jobs to their
own list(s) by setting this value in site.cfg/go.user:

 DIST_OWNER_MAIL_MERGE=1

However many site admins do not wish to grant this permission on a blanket
basis, for a variety of reasons.  Mainly they fear the possible effect on
bandwidth usage of sending single-rcpt mail-merge messages instead of BSMTP
'packages'.  Site admins can grant the DISTRIBUTE privilege to a few trusted
users, by including them in 

 [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]   etc.

Perhaps I am wrong and more sites than I expect allow this.
In any event, the functionality seemed to disappear from the WWW interface in
15.x because the display of it is turned off by default.  Site Admins again
can turn this on by setting 

+* Mail-Merge Settings:
+* Shows links to DBMS or list-based mail-merge in navigation bar.
+SE DBMSMM 0
+SE LISTMM 1

in the site-wide SKIN template.

Anyway, so you can all see just what this webpage looks like since most of you
may not be able to see it on your site, I have taken a snapshot of the page
from my system:

 http://www.besteffort.com/ben/mm-page.html

(the page is largely inactive but the "?" Help link should still work.)