I am managing a few mailing lists which are hosted on a mailman3 instance. None of these are allowing self-subscription, but
I have a need to be able to search the membership by association, ie whether they belong to any of a number of named groups
Currently there does not seem to be any means for attaching a comment field, tag or such to group members, which would allow keeping such metadata and using it for searching members. (and no, the email addresses of members of one or more groups may not be similar, hence searching by @domain or such will not work) Also, the group-association info should *not* be exposed externally (ie to the member in question or any others), which makes adding the tag/group info as part of the full name impossible.
Is there any way to do this in mailman3?
If not can this be counted as a feature request:
- in mailman3 itself:
- add a facility that allows storing additional info to each member , either as a (largish) comment field or an array of tags ++ if tags, it should support managing thousands of them (but each member is likely to only need a few associated)
- if tags are used, each list should have its own set of tags (though a means to designate a list to participate in a global tag collection might be useful).
- in postorious:
- allow modifying the comment field, or adding/removing/modifying one or more tags to each list-member
- allow searching a group's membership by tags (or substring in the comment field), ++ following which mass-operations (deletion, setting moderation flags etc) should be possible based on individual selection of the found fields
mailman3 really only would need to support storing the additional data for each member, as (at least in my use case) that data is not actually required for mail forwarding. However, it seems to be desirable to store the info in the mailman3 database rather than an external system (to reduce chances that these might get out of sync).
mkoerber--- via Mailman-users writes:
I have a need to be able to search the membership by association, ie whether they belong to any of a number of named groups
That's just a mailing list that rejects (or discards) all posts. Mailman core (actually, the backend RDBMS) is perfectly happy to manage millions of rows. Postorius is another matter, it's not highly performant when you get into "thousands", and it would just be "list of members", no "tag algebra" searches.
If not can this be counted as a feature request:
- in mailman3 itself:
- add a facility that allows storing additional info to each member , either as a (largish) comment field or an array of tags ++ if tags, it should support managing thousands of them (but each member is likely to only need a few associated)
- if tags are used, each list should have its own set of tags (though a means to designate a list to participate in a global tag collection might be useful).
- in postorious:
- allow modifying the comment field, or adding/removing/modifying one or more tags to each list-member
- allow searching a group's membership by tags (or substring in the comment field), ++ following which mass-operations (deletion, setting moderation flags etc) should be possible based on individual selection of the found fields
As a volunteer maintainer, I would oppose working to put this in the Mailman distribution. This is a general relational database design, and I am sure if it were available, it would attract many further feature requests. The search and destroy functions would also likely be bug and user error magnets (and both mass deletion and mass moderation are potential disasters). I'm pretty sure that performance in Postorius would be a disaster all of its own -- we'd need to drop a couple levels of abstraction down to raw SQL if you want to query the conjunction or disjunction of multiple tags.
We don't have the manpower for this (unless you want to pay for it, there are plenty of consultants who can do it, including my employer).
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
participants (2)
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mkoerber＠akamai.com -
Stephen J. Turnbull