🚀 go-pugleaf

Here's some background into my problem... I'm working on a front-end to
the mail program on my machine (running SCO Xenix v2.3.2GT and using
smail 2.5c and deliver for mail [though SCO's mail program is still
intact]) and I want it to be very easy to use for people not familiar
with Unix.

When a letter is created and it needs to be delivered, I open up a
pipe to smail and send it all the information: a basic mail header
with the "To:", "From:", "Date:" lines followed by the textual portion
of the user's letter. This works fine. If, however, the user wishes to
send copies to several individuals, I've found that sending a "Cc:"
line through this pipe to smail does not work. It is simply ignored!
The current kludge is to, within a loop, send a copy of each letter
to smail by reopening a pipe and recreating the "To:" line for each
recipient. Needless to say, this is slow and inefficient.

While using the standard SCO mail program, it is possible to use a
"tilde-escape" sequence "~c <user>" to add a user to the "Cc:" line.
I attempted this (by piping the letter though this mail program)
and it was ignored as well. I guess mail interprets this command
and performs the necessary work immediately, instead of looking at
what you type as a whole and parsing this information out (makes
sense) when you finally enter ^D.

So, basically, I am looking for an answer to this problem? How do I
send a letter to multiple recipients, using a pipe to smail, such
that only *one* copy of the letter body is piped, and a "Cc:" line
is somehow generated/interpreted?

Any help is appreciated. I posted a similar article to comp.unix.programmer
and got no replies, but several "If you find out, tell me" letters
from other interested programmers.

Cheers!

-- John Donahue
gumby@ucrmath.ucr.edu