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has anyone integrated an email listserv with CiviCRM? It would be nice to

  1. have a Civi group of 'advisors' and also a listserv, and when there are changes to subscriptions on the listserv, it is reflected in civi, and
  2. to be able to store email messages from the listserv in civi (as activities).

I found this thread on the forum, where the answer is "no" http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=8681.0 (and I am using Wordpress so there's no option for using Drupal Organic Groups), but it's from 2009 so I thought I'd ask again to see if there have been any changes or work-arounds since then.

Any links to resources, guides, articles on how to sync this kind of data would be really helpful. Thanks!

Thanks! -Kristin

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  • With regard to item 2 - do you mean that you want a contact that corresponds to the listserv, and all e-mails will be visible as activities on that contact? Or should every user who receives an e-mail via the listserv have the activity corresponding to that e-mail? Also, are these discussion listservs or announcement listservs? That is, can any subscriber post to the listserv? – Jon G - Megaphone Tech Apr 14 '15 at 14:55
  • Your question was serendipitous and very helpful to me: we were just wracking our brains on how to integrate our aging Mailman listserv into our shiny new CiviCRM deployment. Had no idea about the existing Mailman sync hack that Jon G linked to! Awesome. – Link Swanson Apr 14 '15 at 16:36
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Assuming you mean a discussion listserv, not an announcement listserv (which would allow you to use CiviMail, or Mailchimp/Constant Contact with the relevant integration extension), you have the option of Mailman integration. This method of Mailman integration requires that you have shell access on the Mailman server, but it works to sync your users from Civi to Mailman. So if you wanted someone to unsubscribe, they would use a Civi unsubscribe page, and it would remove them from a group, which would in turn cause them to be unsubscribed from the Mailman group.

Ideally this wouldn't require shell access, but unfortunately, most listserv software simply doesn't have an API. Mailman 3.0 will have an API, but that's been in development for many years. I'd considered at one point creating a CiviMailman integration module using PHP-Mailman, but at this rate Mailman 3.0 might be out first!

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  • Apparently Mailman 3.0 comes out this Thursday! wiki.list.org/DEV/Mailman%203.0. Unfortunately, that's not in time to be included in Debian Jessie, so I don't know how quickly I'll start using it...but this is the major step forward needed to enable CiviCRM/listserv integration. – Jon G - Megaphone Tech Apr 14 '15 at 15:16
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There was some work done syncing mailman groups to civi groups, documented here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Mailman+synchronization

I faintly recollect someone trying / doing a sympa integration too. Both those integrations were at the group/contact level and not at the mailing archive level

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