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Currently I use CiviCRM as basically a "pure" CRM, and then I use an external Mailman provider to maintain two smallish discussion group lists (one with about 8 people, the other with about 50). I have to copy & paste names from CiviCRM into the Mailman interface & make sure they don't get out of sync.

Is it possible to let CiviCRM listen to an address (like [email protected]) and forward all such messages to the members of the "leadership" CRM group? If so, I could get rid of my Mailman setup entirely.

Failing that, is there a way to automatically sync between Mailman and CiviCRM so they don't get out of sync? I can set up my own Mailman instance if I need to (currently I outsource that because my web provider, Dreamhost, has pretty bad marks on spam blacklists, apparently).

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Check that extension https://github.com/fuzionnz/mailman_sync that does sync a group and a mailing list

If you were to prefer sympa than mailman, there is another extension that does the same there https://github.com/civicrm/org.civicrm.sympasync

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  • Thanks. I would prefer to find a solution that lets CiviCRM listen directly to an address and forwards to the group, but if I can't get that working I'll definitely try this.
    – Ken Williams
    Mar 1, 2016 at 3:55
  • Do you know how this module compares with other Mailman modules like drupal.org/project/mailman_integration ? For maintenance reasons I'd prefer to use a module I can install/update with drush.
    – Ken Williams
    Mar 2, 2016 at 3:51
  • @KenWilliams - to be honest, this extension is extremely unlikely to ever get updated, so I wouldn't worry about drush! Also note that this plugin is designed to work with Mailman 2.x, and requires that you have shell access on the Mailman server to install the script. Mailman 3.x was finally released this year after 10+ years in development, and has an API - which would remove the need for shell access, but would require a new extension.
    – Jon G - Megaphone Tech
    Mar 3, 2016 at 6:00
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If you want a civicrm only solution, you will have your own extension.

Civi already allows you to listen to an email address and create an activity for every email received. What you'd need to add is to forward that email to everyone member of a group.

However, all the nice native features around email mailing lists (eg. thread, bounce management...) are going to be missing, or will need additional coding. At the end of the day, if you want a mailing list manager, using a real one seems to be easier than trying to code one in php on the top of civi

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  • Would CiviRules be useful here? When creating Inbound Email activity with target contact being the list, etc.
    – DaveFF
    Mar 1, 2016 at 12:07
  • Possibly, but don't think all the actions and rules you'd need are there out of the box (eg. fetch the list of contact on a group+send emails?
    – Xavier
    Mar 1, 2016 at 13:28
  • Send a bulk CiviMail to the group. Then you've got your bounce and unsubscribe management. Separate but similar rule for each list perhaps. And probably still needs a custom action, but maybe a CiviMail action would be useful anyway?
    – DaveFF
    Mar 1, 2016 at 14:35
  • You could even add a condition to the rule, that the contact must be in the group that the rule is going to send to.
    – DaveFF
    Mar 1, 2016 at 14:37
  • That sounds promising, @DaveFF.
    – Ken Williams
    Mar 2, 2016 at 3:52

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