At 9:28 AM -0400 9/26/01, Stephen Carter is rumored to have typed:
We're setting up a personalization page for each person where they select their areas of interest, manage their information, etc.
So explain to me again exactly what's wrong with them receiving a confirmation that they are subscribed to the informational area they've selected through the web page?
For this kind of use, the "subscribe" message is inappropriate.
I disagree; it's confirmation that the user has done what s/he thinks she has done. Again, if the user is in control, there's no problem.
In addition, a person requesting a single service, may be going on several lists to manage the different kinds of information, depending on their requests. The people coming in from a particular university, for instance, don't want the information specific to another university, but everyone gets the same email for a certain lesson. So multiple lists.
SmartList is not, IMHO, the best choice to handle something like this; you'll end up with a ridiculous number of lists, and writing the scripts to externally manage the lists any given user should or should not be on is going to rapidly become a nightmare. (And this coming from someone who _loves_ SmartList and makes no secret of it.) I suggest you research other solutions (both open-source and commercial) that allow for controllable "topics" that can subdivide a mailing list...or seriously consider writing your own system based on relational database technology (good grief, the only part of SmartList you're using now is the mail burst, and considering your low delivery numbers it doesn't seem to be worth the hassle to use it only for that). You're going to end up with a boatload of external overhead if you use SmartList for this, which will only get worse as your requirements grow more complex. (Given your example above, I wouldn't want to see the system's organizational chart _now_ let alone in a year or two.) At any rate, you've been given the direction to go by Werner if you are determined to continue to kludge SmartList for this and are determined to suppress the subscription confirmations. Charlie