Am 20. Apr, 2007 schwätzte Mark Phillips so:

> I manage an email list of about 1100 people. It is an announce only list run
> through mailman; However, I don't have command line access to mailman, just
> through the web interface. All responses to the email list are ignored.
>
> I need to send out an email to the group asking for a yes or no vote on an
> issue. I don't want to send them to a web page, but instead have the links
> embedded in the email. But the link should be automatic - click on the link
> and a no vote is registered, or click on the yes link and a yes vote is
> registered. Registering a particular vote can be an email to a particular
> address (one for yes and another one for no). Not sure how to do this while
> providing some measure of security - i.e. a person (i.e. an email address)
> should not be able to vote more than once.

Can you require them to authenticate? Since you're doing a list mail you
probably can't do a mailmerge.

I think mailman actually sends out distinct emails to each email address
in order to track bounces, so maybe it also has a mailmerge function.

Barring a mailmerge with distinct URLs I think you need to do the
verification at the web server. Require them to authenticate. Maybe just
require them to give their email address. You could harvest the subscribed
email addresses from the mailman subscriber list.

That might lead to confusion if people use mail forwarders and no longer
remember which email address they've used to subscribe to the list.

Also, it would be easy to impersonate someone else by just knowing their
subscribed email address.

I don't know if you could also snarf the mailman passwords, but most
people don't use them and you'd have trouble keeping them in sync. I
presume the web interface doesn't give you access to the password fields
anyway.

You could also pull the subscribed email addresses from mailman and then
craft your own mailmerge that appears to be a list mail. That mail
wouldn't appear in the mail archives.

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
#  https://www.LuftHans.com/        http://www.CiscoLearning.org/
#  Passwords are like underwear. You don't share them, you don't hang them on
#  your monitor, or under your keyboard, you don't email them, or put them on
#  a web site, and you must change them very often. -- Unknown