Subject: Sending a large address book list problem

From: "Peter W. Karlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1993 16:47:39 -0400 (EDT)

Pine folk,

Here's the scenario: the root user just sent out a mailing to a large
number of users (about 120) which was a mailing list entry in the
addressbook.  When I got the message, (I'm just above the halfway mark),
the subject line was inserted into the middle of the usernames??
Apparently everyone after this line didn't receive the mail.  She (the
root user) broke the list up and sent it again without incident.  Has anybody
experienced this before, is this a Pine problem or a sendmail problem?   The
mail was sent from a Sparcstation running SunOS 4.1.2, using Pine 3.05

Thanks in advance.

-pk

Here's what it looked like to me:

    <Names deleted for sake of brevity>
     :
     :
     [email-masked], [email-masked],
     [email-masked]
Subject: Network Outages Scheduled for this weekend (fwd)
 
u, [email-masked],
        [email-masked], [email-masked]
 
du, 
    [email-masked], [email-masked], 
    [email-masked], 
    :
    :
   <more names>

---

From: "Jason R. Thorpe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1993 18:47:50 -0700 (PDT)

> mail was sent from a Sparcstation running SunOS 4.1.2, using Pine 3.05
                                                               ^^^^^^^^^
Upgrade to 3.07.  Get it at ftp.cac.washington.edu by anon FTP.

Later...

/*****************************************************************************
     Jason R. Thorpe - Weatherford Hall 434 - Corvallis, OR - 97331-1701
        Bellnet (503) 737-9533     Internet [email-masked]
*****************************************************************************/

---

From: Dave King <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1993 09:13:20 +0100 (BST)

Peter - I have had similar problems in the past (sendmail on Sequent
Symmetry DYNIX/ptx 1.4), but my problems were not related to any mailer in
particular. The problem in *my* situation is sendmail: here's a
description ...

When mailing several users using the following shell script fragment: 

while read user_to_mail
do
mailx $user_to_mail < message_to_mail
done < mailing_list

Sendmail is literally bombarded causing it to get very confused and
scramble messages in a similar manner to your experience.

My workaround is to get the script to pause for five seconds between
mailings when several recipients are involved:

while read user_to_mail
do
mailx $user_to_mail < message_to_mail
sleep 5
done < mailing_list

And background the script because it takes awhile.

Maybe it's worthwhile trying these tests on your system? At least you will
be able to pinpoint which part of the mailing procedure is not working as
you expect: sendmail or Pine. 

Finally, I use an adaptation of the above shell script when mailing
several users to avoid the recipients having to plod through umpteen pages
of mailnames (which upsets some) before they get to the message. 

Cheers,
Dave

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave King, Admin. Computing Services Manager, University of Bristol
Email: [email-masked]       Tel: 0272 303961 (Direct Line)