mass mailing

[William Park]

Jonathan Vanasco <jvanasco at hotmail.com> wrote:
> yeah.. thats what i've figured.. i've been playing around with it lately,
> trying to move some of perl's Mail::Bulkmail features into python, based
> on the mailman code...  i think what is going to end up happening, is
> sorting a list of emails by domain name, then processing the domains into
> chunks of 100 or less, and feeding those, via smtplib to postfix as a ,
> delimited list (or so the rfc specks say will work)
> 
> ideally, that will mean 1 envelope/message per chunk -- so my bandwidth
> and qfiles could go down from anywhere between 100 and 0 %
> 
> the extra coding is worth it though -- checking through the mailman
> archives, someone from gnu.org had major problems handling 50,000 emails.
> granted -- this project may never receive more than 100 emails.  but
> should it go higher, i want to be prepared.  and not recoding something
> under a shitty support rate vs an inflated development one :)

I assume you're the OP of another thread on similiar topics.  My news
server lost your original post there.  So, sorry if I'm repeating...

    - Python would be most useful in generating and formating email
      messages (ie. header and body).  
    - Once you have the messages that you want to send, you can use Mutt or
      Sendmail to send the email out.
    - You can limit to 100 simultaneous emails by using 'xargs -P 100' or
      something like that.

1.  I would do something like this.  Use Python to generate
	file.1, file.2, ..., file.1000
    which are emails that you want to send out.  To send them out
    sequentially,
	for i in file.*; do
	    sendmail -t < $i
	done
    and, to send 100 emails simultaneously,
	ls file.* | xargs -P 100 -n 1 mysender
    where 'mysender' is another script which actually calls Sendmail.  From
    top of my head, it would go like
	cat $1 | sendmail -t -f jvanasco at hotmail.com

2.  You can also dump all emails into a single file, and then send out 100
    messages at a time,
	formail -n 100 -s mysender < file.big
    where 'mysender' look like
	sendmail -t -f jvanasco at hotmail.com

3.  You can do this using Mutt directly.

There are so many different ways of doing this.  So, can you provide more
detail to your situation?

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
8 CPU cluster, NAS, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Tin