RE: Email personalization

Barry,
When is 2.1 final expected to be ready?
It sounds like with your help, we should build zMailman with 2.1 in mind.

> So while MM2.1 supports personalized delivery of regular messages
> (personalized digests aren't supported yet), turning this on can
> consume considerably more resources.

I am not clear on the difference.  I think I am just doing personalized
messages, not digests (not yet).  What would personalized digest look like?
Personalization is the Zope hook for me.  Imagine the concept of CMF on
Email!!!  Click-thru tracking is no different than session management for
email.
Coordinating content with email and list management is a beautiful marriage.
HTML mail, though not popular with developers, is gaining momentum.
Without personalization you cant deliver custom content or do click-thru
tracking.
Please let me know if anyone cares about personalization, click-thru
tracking, etc.  This is some of the data I want to correlate with zMailman
to manipulate lists.
I am currently doing this with Zope as the content server with Postgres
collecting click data from the emails.
...i will stop myself.  ;)

The payload idea is the only way I can think of to handle this efficiently.
Zope crunches a list from Mailman and creates a database of the email
address and email.
Mailman picks this up and starts crunching delivery.
My guess this is better than handing off emails one at a time.

> So while MM2.1 supports personalized delivery of regular messages
> (personalized digests aren't supported yet), turning this on can
> consume considerably more resources.

And could provide much better responses in most cases.

> Thus you must enable it in your
> site configuration file.  It's no problem if you're sending out a
> newsletter once a month,

or every day.

> but imagine the chaos if SourceForge allowed
> its lists to personalize delivery!  Got some spare mail farms laying
> around?  (And if you do, donate them to me! :).

I am looking into mail farm requirements. I have heard about FreeBSD/QMail
farms. Could Mailman be optimized for this? Would ZEO matter?

Unsubscribe options should be flexible, too, to admin.
Offer alternative subscriptions when someone wants to unsubscribe via email
or webpage.
e.g. - Getting too many emails? How often do you want to receive emails.
Get emails once a week. Twice a week.  Twice a month. Or how many messages
do you want to receive in each digest.  etc.

Cheers,
Trevor





> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Barry A. Warsaw
> Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 4:54 PM
> To: Trevor Toenjes
> Cc: Stephan Richter; ZMailman Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [ZMailman] Email personalization
>
>
>
> >>>>> "TT" == Trevor Toenjes <[email protected]> writes:
>
>     TT> I have just finished a personalized mailing script that builds
>     TT> a personalized multi-part mime during delivery against a list.
>     TT> But I need to do it for thousands of emails.  I make sendmail
>     TT> calls from an external method and it is slow so I hope to gain
>     TT> external power from Mailman.
>
> You may or may not.  Personalizing emails will increase the bandwidth
> requirements, and the workload on your MTA by up-to the number of
> users on your list.  There's no getting around this.
>
> E.g. If you're sending an exact copy of a message to 1M users, you can
> chunk up the recipient lists and hand them off to the MTA for
> efficient parallel delivery (i.e. "all" AOL users at a time <17
> wink>).  But if each of the 1M users gets their own copy, no chunking
> is possible.  Same problem with VERP.
>
> So while MM2.1 supports personalized delivery of regular messages
> (personalized digests aren't supported yet), turning this on can
> consume considerably more resources.  Thus you must enable it in your
> site configuration file.  It's no problem if you're sending out a
> newsletter once a month, but imagine the chaos if SourceForge allowed
> its lists to personalize delivery!  Got some spare mail farms laying
> around?  (And if you do, donate them to me! :).
>
> None of this is Zope specific unless the personalization you want to
> insert into the message comes from Zope.  I hadn't thought about
> trying to get personalized data from an external source, but it
> wouldn't be hard to add an interface for this.
>
> Or, as mentioned before, Zope could simply and easily post a
> pre-composed message to Mailman.
>
> -Barry
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