Quick Mailing List Solution

[Matthew Seaman]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 05:52:21PM +1000, Anthony Carmody wrote:

> I just got handed a job to do that involves me mailing 6000 people. I
> was wondering if there was a way i could use my FreeBSD server to do
> this that wont upset my ISP..

You would be well advised to discuss what you're going to do with your
ISP before hand, and convince them it's all legitimate lest they
descend upon you from a great height waving AUP's and threatening to
cut you off.

> LDAP?
> Scripts?

It's fairly easy to write a small shell script that sends the same
message in turn to each address in a list of addresses.  There's all
sorts of niceties, like you can substitute the recipient address into
the message headers and personalises the message to the recipient.

Something a bit like this (completely untested, and probably full'o'bugs):

    #!/bin/sh

    recipients='charlie at chaplain.com
                stanley at laurel.com
                oliver at hardy.com
                vladimir.ilyich at lenin.com'
    
    for r in $recipients ; do
        /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi -oee <<E_O_MESSAGE
    From: Anthony Carmody <carmoda at carmoda.com>
    To: $r
    Subject: Circular E-mail

    Dear Correspondent,

    Here is a circular e-mail message for you.
    E_O_MESSAGE
    done

Another trick is to use the aliases(5) system on your machine.  Since
you've got so many recipients, you should use an external include list
for the recipient names.  eg:

Create an entry like this in /etc/mail/aliases:

    my-mailing-list:  :include: /etc/mail/my-mailing-list.entries

Then list the addresses to send to one per line in that file.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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