Virtual Mailing List Managers?

stan7826 asks: "I'm the sysadmin for the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program here in Southern California, and we currently run a small set of public mailing lists for earthquake information. We currently have a set of five lists. Two for long messages, two for short pager-style messages, and one for an ASCII-art map of earthquake shaking. People can subscribe to the list they want from our web page. But we are now looking at making this a statewide service, with a sort of cafeteria-style interface. We want for people to be able to select what events they get notified for by region, magnitude and message type. If I just create a mailing list for each combination, I get 24 different lists for California. This is just begging for some sort of database-driven virtual mailing list manager. Does anyone know of such a beast? (Preferably open-source, of course!)"

Comments

Hate to say it, buuut.

[TermAnnex]

If you can't find something suittable, and you have the time, writing one yourself might be a good investment.

Use your choice of web language to add email addresses to the database.

Then use something like perl to fire off the emails, depending on what the subscriber wants. /trying to stay away from mentioning any specific language or db.

Can be simple if you separate

[DA-MAN]

Separate the functionality you want into a couple of steps, for example why not simply use something like formmail, write a standard form that will send a subscribe request to each of the selected mailing lists.

Then use the standard backend that comes with your mailing list software. For example both ezmlm and mailman (the two packages I am familiar with) need an address verified only once and you can administer all the lists to which you are subscribed to in one neat page after subscribing!

Re:Can be simple if you separate

[ldspartan]

How are you doing this with ezmlm?

I'm looking (albeit not hard) for mailman-like web-based management for ezmlm. Any help would be great.

--
Phil

Re:Can be simple if you separate

[Tv]

Been there done that.

http://ezmanage.sourceforge.net/

Re:Can be simple if you separate

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want that with or without the mailman security issue of the moment?

Probably Nothing Like This Available

[rmohr02]

As the other poster said, you'll probably have to write this yourself. I recommend looking at TIGER and FIPS, which may allow you to have your program be completely dynamic--people could choose to be alerted of seismic events within 100, 500, 1000 miles of their home relatively easily. (I'm not familiar with either of these services, but I remembered their use by the winner of the Google Programming Contest.)

Now for magnitude, you can just flag each seismic event with an appropriate value and see if it meets the threshold the citizens want. And since you have the distance from the epicenter to the citizen's home, you can calculate the effective magnitude that the citizen feels, or you can just leave it as the magnitude found at the epicenter.

Re:Probably Nothing Like This Available

[bobbozzo]

That would be cool.

And easy, actually. I've done some proximity-based searching for a store locator, and it is simple if you have the data (ZIP to lat/long db).

Algorithms and ASP code here:
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/010500-1.sht ml
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/040100-1.sht ml
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/010500-2.sht ml

Just re-write in Perl or Python, and run it anytime there's an earthquake, emailing anyone within X (user definable) miles of the event. (email addresses, zips, etc in MySQL or PostGres)

Free 2000 data at: http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/

Cheap ($29) data at: http://www.zipcodedownload.com/index.aspx

More expensive data at: http://www.GreatData.com/

Re:Probably Nothing Like This Available

[Chester K]

As the other poster said, you'll probably have to write this yourself. I recommend looking at TIGER and FIPS, which may allow you to have your program be completely dynamic--people could choose to be alerted of seismic events within 100, 500, 1000 miles of their home relatively easily. (I'm not familiar with either of these services, but I remembered their use by the winner of the Google Programming Contest.)

Just to provide some additional information about TIGER and FIPS, you could definately use TIGER data to do area-based alerting. FIPS is more of an identification standard. In either case you're going to have to do some custom programming work.

I've done spatial alerting stuff before, with TIGER data in fact. Drop me an email (drysart 'at' evercrest.com), I'd love to see if I could help out with a solution for you -- when I lived in LA your website was the first place I went whenever I felt the ground move; it's only fair I offer to give back what I can.

sounds like custom code to me

[Anonymous Coward]

yup, you'll need to pay someone to write this. you could try yourself though it sounds like if you wanted "do it yourself", you would've done it by now.

Just check your network of contacts you should be able to dig up a perl/python/ruby/php/java programmer who has a framework for web/db apps (every good programmer wrote/uses one these days) and they should be able to whip it up in a coupla weeks.

when you're done (couple thousand dollars later) you have a piece of code you can release as open source and build from there.

I don't think you'll find an off-the shelf product for this sort of thing.

phplist?

[ubiquitin]

You might consider starting with phplist and then adding custom features for each list (QUAKE-ALL, SC-EQPAGER3 etc.).

If you want it customized for you, consider asking these guys. ;)

Re:phplist?

[exhilaration]

PHPList is pretty cool, but is there a similar tool that also handles discussions? In other words, not an "announce-only" mailing list system, but one where everyone can post? I'm using Yahoo Groups right now, and I'd love to move the list to my own server.

I searched Google but my search skillz weren't up to the job.

Re:phplist?

[bobbozzo]

PHPList is pretty cool, but is there a similar tool that also handles discussions?

Checkout GNU Mailman or Sympa.
Both are free; Mailman comes with RedHat, but Sympa is more advanced (choice of databases, ...).

Re:phplist?

[ubiquitin]

I built something fairly similar to this, but it needs threading. The idea is a mysql-based email discussion archive. See olug.phpconsulting.com is an example of a mailing list that is archived. It is only a few short steps to add web-based posting. You have to be careful, though, when building web-to-email interfaces, for the obvious reasons.

Listserv

[menscher]

Listserv has the ability to have sub-lists, which might be able to do what you want. The basic idea is that you can tag each message with a word in the subject line, and users can set preferences for whether they want to get those sublists.

For example, you might have LISTNAME-L with sub-lists Humor, Announce, Discuss. Most people would subscribe to Announce, and possibly Discuss. Probably not many to Humor.

In your case, you would probably end up with 24 sub-lists, and every message would have to have an appropriate subject prefix. Users would then subscribe to each sub-list they want to get by setting preferences.

I'm not at all convinced this is better than 24 real lists, though, and it may be worse. But it's an option for you to consider.

Virtual Mailing List Managers?

[Anonymous Coward]

The esiest thing is to hack mailman. http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman.html

Have you checked these?
http://slashdot.org/books/01/10/02/158239. shtml

sympa might do what you want

[perlchild]

sympa http://www.sympa.org might do what you want, through its cross-db and ldap capabilities, you might want to take a look.

nobody's said it yet?

[divbyzero]

You're going about this all wrong... the data in question doesn't need an email-based interface; the visualizations should be interactive, using Quake! :-)