2000-03-16-11:08:54 Laurent Marsan:
> maybe it's a stupid question asked hundred times already, but
> it would really help if you can tell me how hiding the names of
> all the people I send a mail, to avoid someone of them answering
> everybody.
The feature you're talking about is called blind carbon copy, Bcc.
Put the addresses in the Bcc: header (if you have edit_hdrs on) or
use the "b" command from the message send menu to put them in the
Bcc field.
But note that email Bcc-ed to a user is also the commonest pattern
for wholesale carpet-bombing spammers, so a lot of people filter all
Bcc-ed email that's not specifically from mailing lists that they're
subscribed to.
The alternative is to send a separate copy of the message to each
user, listing each user in the To: field. One way to do that would
be to put the list of addresses in a file "addrs", and the message
with partial headers in a file "message". Perhaps addrs looks like
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
...
and perhaps message looks like
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Hi there
this is the body of the message
Then you could go something like
while read addr;do
(echo "To: $addr"; cat message) | /usr/lib/sendmail $addr
done
or thereabouts.
Beware, you're treading on somewhat scary ground here. You might
want to throw a "sleep" into that loop. Depending entirely on local
details it might want to be "sleep 1" or it might want to be "sleep
120".
Whenever you get into mass emailing, you look exactly like a
spammer, so any booby traps that have been set to squash such vermin
might trip and whap you. Advice: explain precisely what you are
doing, and why, to the admins of your mail server before you start.
-Bennett
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