Mitchell Leben writes:
> Thanks the the idea. Since my list members are all over the place (ie.
> perhaps almost as many domains as members), would this still help?
Yup, it will. Here's the readme:
This is a C program to do "bulk" mailing. For input, it takes a file
of recipient addresses (one address per line) and a message (with
headers already attached) to be sent to the recipients. It sorts the
recipient list by reversed domain (so similar ones sort together),
splits up the recipients into several groups containing no more than N
domains each, creates an SMTP envelope for each group of recipients,
and feeds that envelope to "/usr/lib/sendmail -bs".
Splitting the envelopes up allows sendmail to perform delivery in parallel,
so instead of having one large queue entry (for which sendmail might take
awhile to get around to attempting delivery for some recipients), it has
several smaller queue entries. Depending on your point-of-view, this can
still be considered "cluttering up your mail queue", but it does seem to
deliver messages more quickly to most recipients.
The core of this program was extracted from a somewhat strange mailing
list manager called na-net; it was designed to efficiently send out
mail to 5000 people at a time. I have used this program to attempt
delivery of a message to over 12000 recipients around the world,
within a few hours. I'm currently using bulk_mailer as a back-end for
several mailing lists of modest size.
However, the program is not extensively tested, and may not work well
in all environments. (In particular, if your system has per-user
process quotas, or a small number of process table entries, you will
want to modify this program to recover gracefully.)
There's no warranty on this, but you're welcome to use it if you want.
Installation:
a) edit the Makefile as necessary
b) type "make"
c) copy bulk_mailer to whereever you want it to live.
Usage:
bulk_mailer [options] envelope_from recipient_list_file
The message is then fed to standard input.
'envelope_from' is the envelope return address for the mailing list.
This should either be the address of a human list maintainer, or
the address of a robot that tries to recognize bounced mail messages
and grok it, forwarding anything it doesn't understand to a human.
'recipient_list_file' is a filename of a list of recipients, one
recipient per line. bulk_mailer's address prefrobnicator tries to
understand several forms of address, e.g.:
Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
moore@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
"Keith Moore" <"keith.moore"@cs.utk.edu> (Moore, Keith)
should all do the right thing.
Options:
-debug don't actually mail the stuff. instead, spit SMTP
to stdout
-domain dom.ain Set the local domain name. if not set, bulk_mailer
will try to figure out the name on its own.
Note: This should be a fully-qualified domain name --
not just the first component (aka the "hostname").
If the domain name doesn't have a '.' it's rejected.
-maxdomains ### set the maximum number of domains per envelope to ###.
if not explicitly set, 20 is the default.
-maxsize ##### reject any message larger than ##### bytes.
-precedence xxx add a 'Precedence: xxx' header. 'xxx' should be a
keyword recognized by sendmail. NOT RECOMMENDED.
WARNING: some mailers will bounce the mail if they
see a Precedence header with a keyword they don't
understand; some list managers will silently drop
the mail if they see a Precedence header with a
keyword they do understand. There is NO safe value
for the Precedence header that won't cause some
mailer to mishandle the message. This option is
therefore not recommended.
-reply-to xxx add a 'Reply-to: xxx' header to the resent message
if there wasn't one in the input.
Use of the reply-to header by lists is questionable;
see http://www.unicom.com/FAQ/reply-to-evil.html
for some of the reasons why.
+reply-to yyy add a 'Reply-to: xxx' header to the resent message,
overriding any reply-to header in the input.
NOT RECOMMENDED.
If having a list use reply-to is questionable,
overriding the sender's reply-to header is even
worse. This option should be used only in very
unusual cases.
-sendmail zzz Add the following flags to the sendmail command-line.
For instance, "-sendmail -Odq" would have bulk_mailer
pass the "-Odq" flag to sendmail, which tells it:
"just queue the message, don't attempt to deliver it
immediately".
-v Be verbose.
Use with sendmail:
To have bulk_mailer distributed mail to a list, add the following
lines to /etc/aliases:
{FOO}-request: whoever-maintains-foo
owner-{FOO}: whoever-maintains-foo
{FOO}: "|{BULK_MAILER} owner-{FOO}@{YOUR.DOMAIN} {ADDRESS_LIST}"
where {FOO} is the name of the list, {YOUR.DOMAIN} is your
fully-qualified domain, {BULK_MAILER} is a full path name of the
bulk_mailer program, and {ADDRESS_LIST} is a full path name of the
file containing the list of addresses.
References:
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