Circumventing the print daemon – sending Aleph emails from the server

Abstract

Ten years ago, MIT needed a better solution to sending our circulation notices and letters to vendors. The Aleph print daemon would break down regularly when encountering bad email addresses or a network hiccup while sending. We wrote some scripts to capture XML output meant for the print daemon, run it through a server side script with XSLT processing and a mailer, notify staff with statistics, and leave any problematic letters in a file for the print daemon to retrieve and print out, rather than email. Come hear more details about the use and evolution of these scripts. Code is available through the Developers Network, and has been downloaded by a number of Aleph sites.