Roger Burton West [roger@firedrake.org] wrote:
OK. What does a web interface for smartlist need?
Considering the "list administration" side first:
The most basic version would simply send appropriately-formatted X-Command: mail to the list-server. That's fairly trivial to get right. But I'm considering the possibilities inherent in a slightly larger CGI, which might be run suid to the list user, which could maniupulate the list data files directly - to check authentication, add/remove users, and so on.
What I do here for our mailing lists, we have _everyone_ go through our website to manage their mailing lists. (Kind of like the mailman program.) I hacked Smartlist to prevent it from sending subscribe and unsubscribe messages to the user. This way a user will come to our website, subscribe to the list, the cgi script will generate a username/password from the persons contact info, then the cgi script e-mails the user with this info. It also just sends the appropriate X-COMMAND subscribe/unsubscribe to Smartlist. (then it does silly backend Oracle stuff to keep track of the users info.) This way I can track the people on my mailing list better. It would be nice if a unified frontend cgi script existed, then my poor attempt to hacking procmail scripts. :) It would be a nice option to say if you want smartlist to send a subscribe e-mail or not. my 2c, Steve