[gnu.org #209946] Re: [Savannah-hackers] Log of mails sent through Mailman

[James Blair via RT]

> address@hidden - Mon Sep 06 16:12:03 2004]:
> 
> 95% of people who subscribed to the mail-list appear to be in the
> first 2200 e-mails of my ~30000 emails list. The other ones followed
> the link in the main page, I guess.
> 
> I'd still like to get the authoritative answer from lists.gnu.org.

There's a section of exim log files in ~list/addresses.announce.  It
should be pretty simple to extract the addresses from that.

> Another question is: how would you send these invites; of course,
> command line tool add_members only supports subscribing, not inviting.

The Mailman CGI code is actually pretty readable, so whenever I need to
answer the question "I can do this from the web; how can I do it from a
program?", I can usually find the answer by reading the CGI code.

There's a function in the MailList class:

    def InviteNewMember(self, userdesc, text=''):
        """Invite a new member to the list.

        This is done by creating a subscription pending for the user,
and then
        crafting a message to the member informing them of the invitation.
        """

I think that's what you want.  You should be able to craft a python
script to get that mailing list object, and then call that for the users
you need.  I'm not exactly sure how to use it though (userdesc probably
needs to be an object with certain attributes).  There are probably
enough little python scripts laying around on the system to put together
a script for what you need.

There may be implications for creating 30,000 "pending subscriptions"
for a list, but I don't know.

-Jim