Dear All, Like every other school we get through a lot of trees sending newsletters home to parents. Of course, most don't get home but end up as a layer of compost in the bottom of desks, etc. What I would like to do is to be able to give parents the option of receiving newsletters via email. What would people suggest to set up such a system? Would I need a list organiser like Mailman? Thanks, Nigel Nigel Pauli St. John's School, Northwood
Hi Nigel Mm, interesting idea. A list manager like Mailman would be overdoing it IMHO. What might be really el neato is generating the list of recipients automatically using data from the pupil records system. Here's a Bash script which mails 'message-text' to the recipients in 'recipient-list' with subject 'hello': cat recipient-list | while read a; do mail -s hello $a < message-text; done The recipient list is a text file of email addresses, one address per line. The file must contain UNIX line endings, MS-DOS line endings won't be understood. All you might need to do is build the recipient list, create the message text file, run the script and out goes your spam^H^H^H^H informative and useful email. Phil
Hi all, this assumes two things, 1) you already have a recipients list 2) someone is willing to manage it on a day-to-day basis bear in mind some people change ISP and thus email addresses more often than they change their socks. I would be interested in hearing experiences from people who have set up mailman (or any other), giving an idea of how much work is involved etc., as I'm looking to set one up. Gary On Monday 04 June 2001 11:32 pm, Phil Jones wrote:
Hi Nigel
Mm, interesting idea. A list manager like Mailman would be overdoing it IMHO. What might be really el neato is generating the list of recipients automatically using data from the pupil records system.
Here's a Bash script which mails 'message-text' to the recipients in 'recipient-list' with subject 'hello':
cat recipient-list | while read a; do mail -s hello $a < message-text; done
The recipient list is a text file of email addresses, one address per line. The file must contain UNIX line endings, MS-DOS line endings won't be understood. All you might need to do is build the recipient list, create the message text file, run the script and out goes your spam^H^H^H^H informative and useful email.
Phil
-- Gary Stainburn This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000
Thanks for these responses.
Gary, you make a good point: without constant management a thing like this
is a hindrance rather than a help; and if the front end isn't thought
through well enough the management isn't going to get done.
Phil, thanks for the comment about Mailman - I was thinking that nice though
it is it is a little OTT for the problem as stated. I like the way you sum
it up with the shell script.
I'm now thinking a mixture of mySQL for managing the recipient lists and PHP
for scripting a web based interface. What do people think?
Nigel.
----- Original Message -----
From: Gary Stainburn
Hi all,
this assumes two things, 1) you already have a recipients list 2) someone is willing to manage it on a day-to-day basis bear in mind some people change ISP and thus email addresses more often than they change their socks.
I would be interested in hearing experiences from people who have set up mailman (or any other), giving an idea of how much work is involved etc., as I'm looking to set one up.
Gary On Monday 04 June 2001 11:32 pm, Phil Jones wrote:
Hi Nigel
Mm, interesting idea. A list manager like Mailman would be overdoing it IMHO. What might be really el neato is generating the list of recipients automatically using data from the pupil records system.
Here's a Bash script which mails 'message-text' to the recipients in 'recipient-list' with subject 'hello':
cat recipient-list | while read a; do mail -s hello $a < message-text; done
The recipient list is a text file of email addresses, one address per line. The file must contain UNIX line endings, MS-DOS line endings won't be understood. All you might need to do is build the recipient list, create the message text file, run the script and out goes your spam^H^H^H^H informative and useful email.
Phil
-- Gary Stainburn
This email does not contain private or confidential material as it may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000
participants (3)
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Gary Stainburn
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npauli
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Phil Jones