[H-GEN] Feasibility of setting up a 'Members only' e-mail address on a linux box?

[moondrake at aanet.com.au]

Hi All,

In my day job I work for a statewide membership-based non-profit.  We host
our own mailserver on a debian stable box (sendmail, spamassassin, clamav,
mimedefang, courier-imap combo).

At the moment my working life feels like I'm facing a constant tsunami of
information arriving via e-mail and I'm wondering if there is some neat
way of prioritising those e-mails sent by my organisations paid up
members.

The first thought I had was to:
1) set up an email address - memberaccess at myorg.com.au
2) spit out and regularly update (from our member DB) a plain text list of
the e-mail addresses of all current members
3) allow only e-mails to memberaccess at myorg.com.au where the from address
is in the list of members emails.  Or, possibly set up some script that
regularly scans through the memberaccess email inbox and deletes those
where the from address is not in the list.

The second thought I had was to setup a mailman list to do this - but
AFAIK it's not possible to set the list up to post all entries to a single
address - though perhaps there's a way of hacking this?

Has anyone on the list done something similar to this?  Is the idea above
feasible?  Are there better ways of doing this?

Cheers,

David