On Wed, 01 Jul 1998 13:32:12 +1000, you said:
> Is there some way I can send a message to every list member on every list on
> my site without having to create (and maintain) a superlist with each of all
> of the lists set as sublists? I want the same functionality as a superlist
> i.e. members of multiple lists only get one copy of the message.
Hmm.. Been there, done that. I'm speaking as one of the people who
has to support one of the most heavily online universities in one of
the most heavily online towns (about70%) in the US...
I'm about 98% positive that this isn't what you want, unless you're
one of the lucky sites that has absolutely *NO* non-local lists. ;)
Things to consider:
1) You want to make sure you have an "exclude" capability. Most
servers have at least one or two lists with non-local people on it,
who will be either confused or upset by what they will rightly
percieve as spammage.
2) You want to make sure that your mail server has the capacity to
swallow what you are about to hand it. If we tried this locally,
you'd be looking at some 80,000 recipients - guaranteed to give all
but the most incredibly testosterone-laden mail servers severe
indigestion.
3) You want to think about the *timelyness* of the information, and
whether some other method would work better. For instance, a
corporate printed newsletter may be a better idea. Locally, we do not
send mail globally for timely information such as inclement weather
closings - the information is sent via e-mail and phone to
departmental secretaries, who then forward it on to their departments.
4) You want to think about whether "all users on all lists" is
*really* the list of people that you want to be sending to. Often,
your *real* criteria is "all students in Engineering", or "all
salaried staff" or "all employees likely to be at work on Tuesday".
If the information to be posted is "parking lot closed for
resurfacing, find another way to get to work", you risk upsetting the
employee with a car who isn't on any of your lists. You may have a
much better shot at getting the information to *all* the right people
by feeding an extract of a corporate database to DISTRIBUTE, unless
you have some way of being *sure* that the target audience is a member
of *some* list. And in that case, just mailing to *that* list would
be much more efficient....
Having said all that, the easiest/fastest way would probably be a
little Perl program that grovelled through all the listname.LIST files
and got all the addresses, did some preliminary filtering, and then
built a DISTRIBUTE job for submission. Locally, we usually do some
database trawling from our CSO or Oracle databases, and feed that to
DISTRIBUTE.
And whatever you do, make sure you have somebody else picked out to
take the heat for the inevitable complaints of spam.
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Senior Engineer
Virginia Tech
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