Mailman - Send out emails at different times depending on the timezone of the user?

Question

We need to send out regular emails to people, and we're thinking about using a mailman list. However one requirement is that we want each user to get the email at a different time. We want them to get it at the same time, local time. So if we have 2 users, one in London and the other in Paris, and we want them both to get an email at 9:30am, we could send the email at 9:30am UTC and we want the Londoner and Parisian to get the email at 9:30am local time, (which could be at 9:30am UTC, 10:30am UTC or 11:30am UTC depending on the time of the year). The email body would be the same for all users. Also assume we have a database of all the timezones for each email address on our list.

Is there some way in mailman to do this, or do we have to roll our own?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 25 '09 at 19:09

I assume you know that there is no guarantee with e-mail that it arrives at a certain time, that people could access the mail from different locations at varying time zones etc.. However, I understand the requirements (I had a client who was just asking for this, too:)

Default Mailman does not have any such feature built in. Nor are there filter criteria for e.g. selectively dealing with parts of subscribers. I also do not know about any add-ons that could do this.

Of course, you could set up lists for each time zone. But this means quite some administrative overhead, people will get messages with different list-ids, you'd have to think about dealing with different bounce addresses and such.

Since you probably want to do announcements only (versus discussion lists what Mailman is designed for) I recommend you write some simple scripts to send the messages. If you have a list of addresses and time zones this should be no problem. HTH.

yes that's pretty much the conclusion I've come to. – Amandasaurus Oct 26 '09 at 17:27 — Amandasaurus, Oct 26 '09 at 17:27

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 09 '09 at 13:41

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Is the email content all the same? How do you plan on getting their local time? As far as I know, Mailman doesn't have any facility to capture that information. This sounds like something you will have to write

answered Oct 09 '09 at 13:41

Josh Budde

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yeah the email body is the same. Let's assume I already have a list of email addresses to timezones. – Amandasaurus Oct 09 '09 at 16:02

Mailman - Send out emails at different times depending on the timezone of the user?

2 Answers2