-----Original Message----- From: Rich Kulawiec [mailto:rsk@gsp.org] Sent: 22 February 2012 11:04 To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Customer Notification System.
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 05:58:19PM -0500, James Wininger wrote:
We would need to send notifications out to say about 400 customers. Ideally the system would send an attached PDF. It would be great if this system were SQL based etc.
(a) Use ASCII. Using PDF for this is insane.
(b) You're dealing with only 400 customers, yet you want the overhead and complexity of a SQL-capable database? Do you also engage a fleet of bulldozers when you want to plant a flower in the back yard?
I have thought of possibly using a mailing list type approach, but that gets us back to (almost) where we are today.
Precisely what is wrong with a "mailing list type approach", using Mailman (which is the best available and what runs this list)? It handles COI (mandatory for responsible and ethical operation of all mailing lists), it runs on all varieties of 'nix, it plays nice with MTAs, it deals with most bounces in a sane fashion, etc.
Yeah please don't use PDF. There is nothing more annoying than getting an email about something important that had a PDF attachment to tell you about the important things. Lowest common denominator! I used to use mailman for this, but we had a CRM system as well which was database driven. So I write a script to grab the right email addresses from the database every night and populate mailman. -- Leigh ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. For more information please visit http://www.symanteccloud.com ______________________________________________________________________