[X Newbies] sending large number of e-mails

Vincent Cayenne vcayenne at mac.com
Wed Dec 4 13:19:52 PST 2002


At 2:11p -0500 2002/12/04, J Patrick Draine wrote:
>Can anyone help me out with this situation? I want to send a message 
>to a large number of folks, members of an organization. What mail 
>program would be appropriate for sending something out to 
>approximately 2000  addresses? Obviously I'd want to it to go out as 
>a "blind copy" as recipients would get distressed if the address is 
>many pages longer than the message.
>I could use a PC if there's no easy Mac way of doing this.

I use a Perl script for doing this. There's a module available called 
BulkMail, see 
<http://search.cpan.org/author/JIMT/Mail-Bulkmail-2.05/Bulkmail.pm>.

I apologise if that's a rather geeky reply (not really suited for 
X-Newbies)but I've had major issues with entrusting bulk mailing to 
quirky software. In these spam-hating times, you do NOT want to put a 
foot wrong in sending to 2000 org members! I've had mailings to 
handle for up to 35,000 members of one organisation - one error, one 
glitch and we had weeks of damage control when members received 
multiple mailings. I still do that particular mailing, to a smaller 
subset of members. Even though it is opt-in, errors would NOT be 
well-received! I do it using scripts that I wrote and debugged 
extensively. I use BBEdit, Perl scripts and sendmail, all off my 
PowerBook. I have rather specialised needs but a simple mailing can 
be accomplished with about 20 lines of code.
-- 
Expedience will byte you terribly later! - Dov Isaacs



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