> We are getting more and more requests to construct large mailing lists
> encompassing large segments of our student body. In the interests of
> not hammering the mail spool partition and not cluttering email boxes
> with junk mail we try to shunt these requests towards a local news group
> type solutions.
I think we need a technological answer to this kind of problem. If you
could replace all your mailers at once it might work to teach the
delivery program to store one message per file and do multiple recipients
on the same machine with links. But since that isn't likely and you
may not have everyone on the same host/filesystem anyway, how about
a scheme like this:
Postings to the list go (only) to a web-browsable archive through
something like Mhonarc.
Subscribers receive a notification containg only the sender, subject,
and URL of the archived copy.
Digests handle multiple lists, digest subscribers would only receive
messages at fixed intervals if postings have been made to any of
the lists they are watching. These would contain only lists of
the URLS for new postings.
Most up-to-date mailers know how to launch a browser when you click
on a URL in a message, and even if they won't it is a simple
cut and paste operation in any windowing system. You could still
allow direct subscriptions to lists for the browser-impaired too.
The only thing that should take any real change to Majordomo would
be the digest version that spans lists, although if someone wanted
to use this for serious notification purposes they might want to
allow some sort of short 'summary' to pass through that could be
a bit longer than a subject line.
Les Mikesell
les@mcs.com
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