ServerWatch content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
I discovered this week that Mailman has a topics facility. This means
you can assign messages to a topic based on a regular expression and
match the Subject and Keyword lines in every mail. Members of the mailing
list can then subscribe only to particular topics of their choice, rather than to the list as a whole.
Tip of the Trade: Juliet Kemp discovers and explores Topics in the mailing list server, Mailman. With Topics, subscribing to a list becomes more than an all or nothing proposition.
This is enabled in the Topics section of the mailing list admin pages. You can
also set how many lines of the body are scanned for matches. Set this to 0 to
scan only the Subject and Keyword lines. Set the name of the topic (e.g.,
“Networks”), then create your regular expression. Regexps here are
case-insensitive, so there’s no need to worry about capitalization. The most
straightforward option is just to set a single word, for example,
networking
which will filter any messages with ‘networking’ in the Subject line, the
Keyword line, or the first 5 body lines into this “Networks” topic.
Alternatively, you might want to try this:
[networks]
which will match [networks]. You can, of course, get far more complicated than
this if you want to, but I’ll leave more comprehensive discussion of regexps
to elsewhere!
If you want to use “or” filters, the online help implies that putting your
various regexps on separate lines will do it:
networks networking
Unfortunately, due to a bug in
Mailman 2.1, this doesn’t happen: What you need to do is to add the |
(or) operator at the end of the line:
networks| networking
This will match on either ‘networks’ or ‘networking’. You also need to escape
whitespace with a backslash.
Once you have a couple of topics set up, list members can go to the member
options page and choose the topics to which they wish to subscribe.
This can be an excellent solution for high-volume or multi-topic mailing
lists. Do bear in mind, however, that it relies on members setting their Subject
lines correctly (or mentioning the topic in the first few lines of the body),
which is obviously susceptible to human error.
Juliet Kemp has been messing around with Linux systems, for financial reward and otherwise, for about a decade. She is also the author of “Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach” (Apress, 2009).
