At 5:04 PM -0400 7/31/02, Anne Judge annoyed us with:
Here's an example:
Better to be maintained in an external database with the additional data you'd want to store, and generate the dist file from it (possibly a nightly cron job; oh, yeah, another unix command you don't want to hear about - maybe there's a button you can push on the Mac?). I did exactly that for a client using MySQL to maintain the data, PHP to securely manage it remotely, and SmartList to handle the list mailings.
Or a list for club or organization directors & officers
See above, although in this case unless you have hundreds of "directors & officers" most normal people wouldn't need it, since they wouldn't be using a SmartList distribution list as their private address book. (There'd be all that FTPing back-and-forth to do.) Maintaining this information in the distribution file of a mailing list server continues to make no sense whatsoever to me. But again, that's the nice thing about open source; if you take the time to learn it, you can make it do anything you want. If you don't, you're stuck with what you get out-of-the-box.
Oooh, I hope I'm not upsetting charlie's delicate ego by daring to offer a thought . . .
Hardly; it would take someone with actual unix knowledge to challenge my perfectly-healthy ego (like David Linn, who mentioned unlink in a private email and set me researching it since I'm embarassed to admit I never heard of it before). I see it's time for another twit filter, though, to immediately increase the s/n ratio of the list: :0 * ^X-BeenThere: smartlist * ^Received:.*safepages.com * anne.judge /dev/null (safepages.com is in a number of anti-spam filters already for providing cheap drop-box accounts, FWIW. Now I see why.) With this filter in place, you're welcomed to waste time arguing with yourself. Please enjoy the sound of one hand clapping. Charlie -- A virtual chihuahua, gnawing on the pantleg of the truly ignorant. It's futile, of course, but I am undaunted.