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Collaborative web publishing tools for not-for-profits

From Mitra (mitra[at]earth.path.net):

I am using alerts/mailman integration, - its one of the most painful AA admin procedures, basically you have to create an alert that goes to a mailman group. Here are the steps (note that I've SIMPLIFIED it, removing sub-steps).

This presumes you have:

• A Reader Management slice created
• Mailman installed, and documented elsewhere how to add lists
• Cron working and running the AA cron function for Alerts

1. In the slice you want to send mail from:
   • Create a Alerts View - (known elsewhere as a Selection)
2. Create Alerts Slice and change settings as follows
   • Create a new Alert Template - Cut and paste from Generic Alerts in a separate window
   • Make sure to set the "From" address to something that can be responded to (a human, not a list)
   • Settings -> Alert, set to the new template
   • Selections, add Alerts View created above
   • Reader Management -> set to your Reader Management slice (see note) and "Add or Refresh" (make note of field names for below)
   • Send Emails -> send a test message to yourself, it should come immediately (check in your spam folder, it often gets filtered as such), note this won't look like it does through mailman
3. Go to mailman, create a mailing list - set yourself (a human) as the owner, set to moderate new subscribers
4. Go to your Reader Management slice (see note)
   • Can be useful to Edit item manager to ad a column for this alert (using the field names like alerts1....agxav)
   • Add the address of the new mailing list as a reader, mark it as confirmed, subscribe it to the Alert just created
   • Look for the Alerts welcome mail, which can take time (depending on Cron)
5. Now try and add an item to your slice,
   • Wait for the mail to turn up at the mailing list moderator address,
   • Follow the link into mailman and set the user filter to allow mail from this address to go straight through.

Note that in practice you can only have ONE functioning reader management slice in an entire AA installation since it has email unique - apparently there are historical reasons for this, but it is unclear if there are current reasons.

This is essentially an admin nightmare, do anything even slightly wrong and the mail won't go through, and its very hard to debug.

I believe this could and should be dramatically simplified, we don't have the development resources to build our own mailing list manager in competition to all mailman's functions, better would be to allow an Alerts View to send mail direct to a mailing address - typically the email address of the mailman list.