3.15. How do I enable personalization (messages tailored to the recipient)?

Personalization means customizing certain parts of the message for each individual recipient. The most obvious use is to set the To: header to each individual's address, but there are many other possible uses, such as customized footers. Personalization was introduced in Mailman 2.1.

Personalization may considerably increase your bandwidth usage; see the discussion on VERP for more details.

To allow list owners to personalize messages, set the OWNERS_CAN_ENABLE_PERSONALIZATION variable to true. (Read about it in $prefix/Mailman/Defaults.py, but change it in $prefix/Mailman/mm_cfg.py.) Note that "true" in Python is the value 1 (one).

Now the owner of each list can turn on personalization of that list. To turn on personalization, login as list owner and look at the second option under "Non-Digest Options". Follow the "details" link for a helpful discussion of how you can personalize the messages.

Note that setting personalize to 'Yes' for a list only enables the additional personalized replacements for msg_header and msg_footer. If in addition you want the recipient's address in the To: header of the message, you need to set personalize to 'Full Personalization'.

As long as you are sending personalized messages, you might want to set VERP_PERSONALIZED_DELIVERIES to true as well.

After you have changed VERP_PERSONALIZED_DELIVERIES, you need to restart qrunner for the change to actually take effect.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.