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In article <AGV4lngGkB@lynx.jet.riga.lv> iva@jet.riga.lv writes:
>In article <antbh.717439413@strix>,
>antbh@strix.udac.uu.se (Bernhard Helander) writes:
>> I am editing and distributing a small newsletter. The number of recipients
>> have grown and I am acutely embarassed over the primitive distribution
>> format. I have assembled all my subscribors in a file and when I send
>> out the news letter a give a simple "r*" (reply all) command. This means
>> that the header of each newsletter contains the names of all the addresses
>> to the subscribers. Is there a more elegant way of doing this?

>Try to use the following shell script:

[a "cat | mail" loop to each recipient shell script omitted]

This isn't a good idea at all.  Most mail systems spawn off a copy
of the MTA in the background for each invocation of mail.  Which
means, if you have more than a couple recipients, you could hang
your machine and/or crash some of the MTA invocations.  This
is standard behaviour for *most* MTAs, including sendmail.

[You should see the result when there's a 100 simultaneous
invocations of sendmail!]

Furthermore, this defeats the batching mechanisms of many mailers.

The simplest method (on sendmail and with many other MTAs) is to
place the list of subscribers in the system wide alias file.
(eg: /usr/lib/aliases on sendmail sites).  ala:

	newsletter-list-out:	list of names (or use an include file)

Then send the news letter to "newsletter-list-out".

The MTA (most at least) won't expand the system alias into the "To:"
line in the message, so the recipient names won't appear in the
message at all.  And there's only one invocation of the MTA.
This will work with pretty well any user interface.

More sophisticated mechanisms often work best when you invoke
the MTA directly.  Ie: I send out my mailing list with
a shell script that invokes "smail" (my MTA) directly.
This permits me to hand-craft the To: and From: lines to
prevent bounces going to untoward places, and insert Reply-To:s
etc.
-- 
Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
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