Re: How to broadcast to all lists?

Thanks for the suggestions Charles.

Charles Cazabon <[email protected]> wrote:
> One easy way is to bypass most of the list functionality
> and feed your message directly to ezmlm-send, once for
> each list directory.  See the ezmlm-send documentation
> for details.
>
> A possible downside is that people subscribed to multiple
> lists will receive multiple copies of the message.

Understood.  Unfortunately, as you point out, that violates one
of my assumptions/constraints:

* I don't want subscribers to get duplicate e-mails of any
  broadcast messages

so I'd rather not do it that way.

> ... create a separate list for these announcements.
> People not subscribed to the other lists can subscribe
> to it at will.  Then before you send a message to this
> list, you just feed the subscriber lists of all the
> other lists to ezmlm-sub for this list -- if they're
> already subscribed, nothing happens, otherwise they get added.
>
> Everybody on the list only gets one of the announce messages.

Nice suggestion, thanks!  Now... suppose I add another constraint:

* I'd like to be able to keep track of those who directly
subscribed to the list vs. those I programmatically add to send
out the broadcast.

To solve for this additional constraint... Could I set up a
sub-list for the programmatic subscriptions and keep the direct
subscribers on the "top-level" subscriber list?  This raises two
questions:

1) Can I have subscribers on the top-level list and on the sub-list

2) Does ezmlm handle duplicate removal (at send time) when the
duplicates are spread between the top-level list and a sub-list?
 
I'm guessing the answer to the first question is "yes" and the
answer to the second question is "no".

To solve for the second quesiton, I could use ezmlm-list and the
comm command line tool to figure out which subscribers shouldn't
be added to the sub-list.

Something like:

ezmlm-list <LISTDIR>/broadcast-list | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | sort >
/tmp/direct_subs

{
for list in <LISTDIR>/*
do
  ezmlm-list $list
done
} | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | sort -u > /tmp/all_subs

comm -3 /tmp/direct_subs /tmp/all_subs | ezmlm-sub
<LISTDIR>/broadcast-list/sub-list

Anything wrong with this approach or is there a more elegant way?

-- David