How to Personalise Email Content with Usernames in Mailman 3
Hello,
I am currently working with Mailman 3 and looking to enhance the personalization of the emails sent through our mailing list. Specifically, I wish to include the recipient's username in the email content, similar to a personalized greeting (e.g., "Dear [username]").
My questions are:
- Does Mailman 3 support the inclusion of personalized data (like usernames)?
- If yes, how can I do that? Is there any placeholder for that?
Any guidance or suggestions on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time and assistance.
On 11/17/23 07:03, Zaheer Abbas wrote:
Hello,
I am currently working with Mailman 3 and looking to enhance the personalization of the emails sent through our mailing list. Specifically, I wish to include the recipient's username in the email content, similar to a personalized greeting (e.g., "Dear [username]").
My questions are:
- Does Mailman 3 support the inclusion of personalized data (like usernames)?
You can enable full personalization which will put the recipient's address in the To: header. In addition both Individual and Full personalization allow personalized information in message headers and footers, see https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/rest/docs/t.... This could be used to add a personalized header, but depending on the MIME structure of the message after content filtering, these may be added as separate MIME parts rather than prepended/appended to the message body. See https://wiki.list.org/x/4030707 for more on this.
Mailman has no facility other than the above for modifying message bodies.
- If yes, how can I do that? Is there any placeholder for that?
See the above links.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Hi Mark,
You can enable full personalization which will put the recipient's
address in the To: header. In addition both Individual and Full personalization allow personalized information in message headers and footers, see
https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/rest/docs/t... . This could be used to add a personalized header, but depending on the MIME structure of the message after content filtering, these may be added as separate MIME parts rather than prepended/appended to the message body. See https://wiki.list.org/x/4030707 for more on this.
Thank you so much for your quick response as always. As a newcomer to Mailman 3, I'm still navigating through its complexities, and your help is greatly appreciated.
I've been experimenting with templates, however, I'm struggling to understand how to enable personalized deliveries for a list. I found some related documentation here <https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/mta/docs/decorating.html#:~:text=Edit%20on%20GitLab-,Personalized%20decoration,%EF%83%81,-Personalized%20messages%20can>Personalized Decoration in Mailman, but I'm having trouble grasping it.
Could you please point me in the right direction for enabling personalized delivery in the Mailman 3 configuration, i.e. in the mailman.cfg file?
Thanks again for your help and sorry for any inconvenience.
p.s I am using Debian package for Mailman 3.2.2-1
On 11/17/23 12:13, Zaheer Abbas wrote:
Could you please point me in the right direction for enabling personalized delivery in the Mailman 3 configuration, i.e. in the mailman.cfg file?
It's not in mailman.cfg. It's a list setting. In Postorius list settings -> Alter Messages -> Personalize.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Zaheer Abbas writes:
I wish to include the recipient's username in the email content, similar to a personalized greeting (e.g., "Dear [username]").
Are you sure you're using the right software? Much as I love Mailman, it is not intended to be a "mail merge" software used for generating personalized replies from template + database. There is software specifically for this purpose, and you might be better off investigating those, since they will have documentation suited to precisely this need.
That said, besides Mark's remarks which you should read carefully, it would be "simple" (for a programmer with some Python and database skills) to write a handler that reads a template file (or accepts a template email) and populates template variables with values from the database. Then insert the handler into the posting pipeline.
If that's attractive to you but you don't have the skills (and aren't in a position to acquire them quickly), there are consultants on the job boards on the Mailman wiki and Python site. It doesn't take much specialized knowledge of Mailman.
Steve
participants (3)
-
Mark Sapiro -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Zaheer Abbas