The problem
- You have a large number of users - for example, the students at a university.
- You need to email different subsets of these people at different times.
- Maintaining a mailing list for every subset is tedious and error-prone.
- There'll occasionally be a need to email some disparate group - e.g. all those studying Chemistry and living on staircase six - which there is no mailing list for. This usually means everyone else who studies Chemistry/lives in the same building gets spammed with irrelevant messages.
The solution: Attribmail
Attribmail is a computer program (written in Python) designed to solve the above problem. It takes a database of your users and their attributes (subject, staircase number, etc.) - which you probably had lying around anyway - and plugs into your MTA to allow you to send to addresses like this:
subject.chemistry.staircase.6@atm.yourdomain.tld
Because these addresses don't have to be configured in advance, you can email any group of users you have the attributes stored for, at any time.
Getting Attribmail
Attribmail is released under the GNU General Public License. It's very much a work in progress at the moment - feel free to experiment with the current Subversion copy by browsing the web interface or doing:
$ svn co https://svn.dnorth.net/attribmail/trunk attribmail
Attribmail depends on:
- Python 2.4 or higher
- An MTA - I've tested it on Exim 4 and Postfix 2.5. Let me know if you get it working with something else.
You can see my eventual plans for Attribmail on the roadmap. If you'd like to be told when the codebase reaches a useable state, email me, or keep an eye on the RSS feed.
The author
Attribmail is being written by me, David North, a student based in Oxford, UK. The idea came to me because I'm all too often on the recieving end of emails not indended for me, which Attribmail would eliminate. My home page is here.