[Mailman-Users] Site administrative broadcast to all lists and all list members - server wide

This is from the code comments in the file CalcRecips.py.

# Support for urgent messages, which bypasses digests and disabled
# delivery and forces an immediate delivery to all members Right Now. We
# are specifically /not/ allowing the site admins password to work here
# because we want to discourage the practice of sending the site admin
# password through email in the clear. (see also Approve.py)

I would assume, from this, that the mechanism is the same as for an
"Approved:" header or pseudo-header. If you have a mail program that
can add arbitrary headers then you can add a true mail header, with
"Urgent: some_password". If your mail program won't do this, you can
use a pseudo-header by putting "Urgent: password" as the very first line
in a post to the list ('password' is either the admin or moderator
password. There must be no lines above this pseudo-header in the email
body, and it must be left-justified.

--
Lindsay Haisley | "We are all broken | PGP public key
FMP Computer Services | toasters, but we | available at
512-259-1190 | still manage to make |<http://pubkeys.fmp.com>
http://www.fmp.com | toast" |

First, a few things about an 'urgent' message. This is a list function,
not a server function. If you send an urgent message to a list, it
only goes to the members of that list. If you send it to all lists,
members of more that one list will be sent multiple copies.

Also, urgent messages are not sent to owners or moderators unless they
are also list members. To mail the owners and moderators of a list,
send mail to LISTNAME-owner at ...

That said, the Urgent: <password> header is just that. It must be added
to your message as a header. Unlike Approved:, it can't be a
pseudo-header in an initial body line, It must be a real message
header. How you do this is a function of your MUA (mail client). Mutt
makes it fairly easy to edit a raw message before it is sent and add
headers. With thunderbird, you can go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced
-> Config Editor... and add Urgent to mail.compose.other.header to add
it to the To:, Cc:, etc pulldown list in mail composition.

Other MUAs such as I think MS Outlook and most webmail clients do not
provide a way to do this.

Thanks for the clarification. I mis-spoke in my post, just prior to
yours, in suggesting that this might work with a pseudo-header.

Lindsay and Mark:

Thanks for your advice on the broadcast message and how to add the
appropriate header. I guess my next question would be if it is possible at
all to send such a broadcast message to all lists (and thus all list
members) at one time. I have 60 + distinct/unique lists and would not want
to send the same message sixty times if I did not have to - Any ideas?

Thanks again - Brandon

bin/find_member . | grep -v "^ " | sed "s/ found in://" | \
xargs mail < message_file -s "The Subject"

If you want to include owners and moderators who aren't list members,

#!bin/sh
bin/find_member . | grep -v "^ " | sed "s/ found in://" > member_file
bin/list_owners -m > owner_moderator_file
sort -u member_file owner_moderator_file | \
xargs mail < message_file -s "The Subject"

Brandon Rodak writes:
Make an umbrella list, ie, the subscribers are the 60+ lists.
Optionally add the LIST-owner addresses. Set it up as announce-only.

The main glitch here is that the umbrella list will probably clean out
the Urgent header since it contains a password, and the 60+ lists will
deliver the message as usual (including digest processing if the users
have that enabled. Fixing this (if I am correct) would probably
require customizing the Mailman code a bit.