• Author: Wael Nasreddine
• Source Code: Github

Synopsis

AutosyncML is a script to synchronize mainling lists against a database

Description

We, The AULF webmasters, wanted to minimize our efforts by creating a robot to update the mailing lists subscriptions, which I'll detail in the next section, so I wrote this script to do exactly what we wanted.

Problem

On the website of the AULF, students can open an account and become members of the AULF, send and receive emails from/to the people in the same department as they are in, or studying the same major as they are etc.. We used to subscribe and un-subscribe manually each update / new addition which become an endless job after a while, so we needed to automatize this process, and autosyncml was the best solution.

Solution

AutosyncML acts as a proxy between mysql and mailman, it can communicate with both of them and here's how it works:

• Get a list of all available mailing lists
• Get a list of all available subscribed members to the available mailing lists
• Get a list of all available members in the database and for each member:
  • Check if the email has changed by comparing it against a second copy (made by a previous run)
  • If the email has changed, the old email will be un-subscribed from all mailing lists, the new email will be subscribed.
  • Get a list of all already subscribed mailing lists
  • Get a list of all mailing lists that this email should be subscribed to
  • un-subscribe him from lists he's subscribed to but shouldn't be subscribe to
  • Finally, subscribe him to the lists he should be subscribed to but not already subscribed to
• Send the log to the defined email in the settings.

Installation

To install, you first need a copy of the code, so check it out

git clone git://github.com/eMxyzptlk/autosyncml.git

Go inside the autosyncml folder and run make / make install

make prefix=/usr
sudo make prefix=/usr install

Edit the settings file

vim /etc/autosyncml.ini

Setup a cronjob, to run (every 30 minutes if no control file, every minute with a control file):

Every 30 minutes:

*/30 * * * * export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin; /usr/bin/autosyncml

Every minute:

*/1 * * * * export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin; /usr/bin/autosyncml

To report bugs or ask for new features, please use the Tickets tab on the project page