From: Tom Holub (tom@LS.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 16:01:38 PDT
On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 02:58:33PM -0700, Sara Leavitt wrote:
> Hello,
>
> What is the best way to automate the update of a departmental mailing list?
>
> Our departmental mailing addresses (300+) are in a local
> web-accessible database. We have been running a script that copies
> the data from a web page and pastes it into the UCLink Simple
> Mailing list web page. Lately, this has become unreliable and needs
> to be replaced with a different method.
>
> I have considered scripting a majordomo list, but then we would have
> to keep track of who was added and deleted in the database and
> whether or not their address was sent to majordomo. This is a
> possibility, but might be prone to mishap.
>
> I have heard that it might be possible to script the batch update of
> a socrates mailing list. Has anyone tried this?
>
> Any other suggestions?
It's possible to script the update process on either socrates or uclink, but
neither of them is as simple as they might be. For uclink, you'd have to
have a script access the bilink web page, log on as the owner of the list,
open the list and submit the form to the relevant CGI. You might be able to
shortcut this, but it's not going to be an easy script to write. If your
web database is done in Perl or a similarly powerful language, you could
write this into the database update procedure--when the database is updated,
it could go update the mailing list.
On socrates, things are somewhat simpler. Mailing lists on socrates are
updated through a "maillist" command, which prompts you for an editor. You
could write a script which would replace the editor, grab the mailing list
off your web site and save it to the file maillist is looking for. Or, you
could have the script edit the alias file directly; socrates appears to
discourage this--the location of the mailing list files isn't published, but
it's not hard to find, and the files are owned by the owner of the list, so
you could write to yours directly with your script.
-- Tom Holub (tom_holub@LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069) College of Letters & Science 249 Campbell Hall------------------------------------------------------------------------ The following was automatically added to this message by the list server:
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