Free Stuff from America's Town Square
A simple "Swiss Army Knife"
bulk e-mailer
Do you frequently have the need to send a document to a group of people?
A bulk e-mailer may be the solution. Each person will receive an
individualized message, no carbon or blind carbon copies.
First, create a file containing the full e-mail address of the list recipients. The addresses should be one per line in the form user@domain. You might have a script append an e-mail address to the file as a result of a subscription request or information request.
The second step is the creation of a file containing the message you want sent to your mailing list. Assuming your script is named mail2lst.pl, you will start the processing going by starting the script. An example might be:
mail2list.pl [message-file] [mailing-list-file] [message-subject]
The message's subject should be enclosed in quotation marks if the subject contains blanks.
All passed parameters are optional and default values assigned in the script if they are not entered on the command line. (You can change these defaults.) The command line are positional, if you wish to supply a subject, while retaining the default mailing list and message files, pass null values with two consecutive quotation marks. As an example:
mail2lst.pl "" "" "Holiday Newsletter"
Create the following Perl script. (Feel free to cut and paste.)
#!/usr/bin/perl ########################################################################## # mail2lst.pl Version 1.0 September 17, 1996 # # Swiss army knife list mailing script. # # Individually mails the same message and subject to a group # # of recipients. Command line parameters may be passed or user-defined # # defaults may be used. # # Copyright 1996 by Urb LeJeune, lejeune@charm.net, and, # # America's Town Square, http://www.intserv.com/~web # # Last modified on September 17, 1996 # ########################################################################## # COPYRIGHT NOTICE # # Copyright 1996 Urban A. LeJeune. All Rights Reserved. # # Non commercial use of this script, with or without modifications, # # may be freely copied, reproduced, distributed, or used in any # # fashion provided this copyright notice is retains. # # # # Licensing of this product is available from: # # America's Town Square e-mail to lejeune@charm.net # # 15 Hunter Drive # # Tuckerton, NJ 08087 Phone (609) 294-0320 # ########################################################################## # # # There are three optional command line parameters. The name of the # # file contain the message to be distributed, the name file containing # # the mailing list (one full e-mail address -- user@domain -- per # # line, and the subject of the message. Typically entered as: # # mail2lst.pl list.txt message.txt "This is the subject" # # If the subject contains blanks it must be enclosed in quotation marks # # These are positional parameters. If you wish to supply a subject, # # while retaining the default mailing list and message files, pass # # null values with two consecutive quotation marks. As an example: # # mail2lst.pl "" "" "September Newsletter" # ########################################################################## ($Message, $MailList, $Subject) = @ARGV; # Command line parameters $Message = "message.txt" unless $Message; # Most common if nothing passed $MailList = "mail.list" unless $MailList; # Most common if nothing passed $Subject = "ATS Newsletter" unless $Subject; # Frequently used subject open (LIST,"$MailList"); @list =; foreach $key (@list) { chop($key); print "Now processing $key\n"; `mail -s "$Subject" $key < $Message`; } # End of for loop return 1; # Script completed successfully
Stay tuned for more free stuff.
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