Quick Mailing List Solution

[Josef Grosch]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 11:33:50AM +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> 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.

Oh, yes. Unless your company is very large and does this volume all the
time, 6000 emails suddenly being sent by your company would make your
access provider sit up and take notice. 

> 
> > 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.

If this is a one time thing, try using the attached perl script. It is
brute force but it works. Oh, don't try and use the machine that this
script is running on while it is running, it will be really busy.

If you are going to be doing this often or this is going to be an on going
event you might want to consider using a mailing list package like
mailman, which is in out our ports collection. It would save you a lot of
trouble and script writhing.  


Josef

-- 
Josef Grosch           | Another day closer to a | FreeBSD 5.1
jgrosch at MooseRiver.com |   Micro$oft free world  | Berkeley, Ca.
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