On [2002-Jul-31] Anne Judge anne.judge@alum.mit.edu quoted & wrote:
(I suppose there is some sensible reason for a mailing list server to retain human names, but it escapes me at the moment)
Here's an example: A club list where the list manager wants to know which club members are on the list, and which people on the list are not (current) club members - since people often have multiple addresses and will sign up for an email list at a diffent address than they supply the club's membership director.
My need for a real_name <-> email_address connection wasn't strong enough to go the full database route (which is, as Charlie notes, the best full-strength solution) so I opted for just an additional file created during the subscription process. I called it "registry" and it holds just some very basic info on the subscriber. Since all subscription is done by a maintainer via xcommands it was easy enough to restructure the xcommands to handle this, e.g.
xcommand .... subscribe <email> name <firstname_lastname>
where "name" is a new xcommand which writes the <email> and <firstname_lastname> to the registry file.
Richard