Sending renewal notices (was Re: Let's think about the elections!)

[Vincent Untz <vincent vuntz net>]

Le mercredi 20 octobre 2004 Ã 23:49 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta a Ãcrit :
> On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 22:30 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > Do you know how to do it? There's a script in CVS to send the mails. I
> > don't remember all the details right now, but I can write some notes
> > about this if you want.
>
> OK - that will be very helpful.

Sorry for the delay...
Here we go.

The first thing to do is to find all the memberships that will end
before the end of the elections (i.e. before December 17th). It's easy:
just search for something like "2002-" in membership_new.txt (people who
were accepted before 2002-12-17 will have to renew). A quick grep
reveals that there are 121 members who will need to renew (I did not
look at the results, but the number should be correct).

Copy all the lines for these members in a new file (for example
need-to-renew.txt). Now you can use renew-mailout.pl. You may want to
look at it if you grok perl. This script opens a file and sends renewal
notices to the members it finds in the file. Thus, you would call it
like this:
$ renew-mailout.pl --file=need-to-renew.txt

Note that if you want to send a second (and last) renewal notice later,
you can call it like this:
$ renew-mailout.pl --reminder --file=need-to-renew.txt

The script tells you how many mail it has sent. I think you need to have
a mail server installed to use it (i.e. you need to
have /usr/sbin/sendmail).

You may want to look at your mail server logs (and maybe keep them) to
know if all mails were delivered. Last time I sent some renewals, there
were 10 or 20 mail errors.

I hope these explanations are understandable :-) If they are, maybe it
would be useful to add them to CVS (we should probably have a doc
subdirectory...).

Tell me if you have any problem

Vincent

-- 
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