Subject: Group redirection

From: john slimick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 16:32:56 -0400 (EDT)

We just finished a workshop here and the participants
want a way of posting mail to an address on this machine
(tioga.upb.pitt.edu) that broadcasts the mail to all the
participants. I created a mailing list for my uses in
contacting people, but how can that be used to redirect
mail to 24 addresses or so?

Thx in advance
John Slimick
[email-masked]

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From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 09:34:37 +0100 (BST)

Assuming that when you say "I created a mailing list for my users" you're 
talking about a list entry in Pine's address book...

The answer is "you probably can't".  The reason is that Pine's address
book "list" feature should be thought of more as a "personal distribution
list" rather than a "mailing list".

In particular if this is defined in your personal address book then it is 
only you who can use it (via its nickname) when composing a message.

You can set up a "global address book" which is in effect a centrally 
held read-only address book that can be used by people on the same 
machine running Pine.  Indeed this _may_ be what you're after doing.

However if you are hoping for a way of your users sending a message to a 
"special" e-mail address and then have this remailed out to the list 
members automatically then Pine does not (cannot) do this.

This is because Pine is a Mail User Agent (MUA).  This is a fancy name 
for saying it lets you read through messages that have *already* been 
delivered into your mailbox file.  The thing that actually delivers the 
messages there is called a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) and is usually a 
system program such as "sendmail".

It is the task of the MTA to decide what to do with an arriving message: 
whether it is simply to be delivered into the user's mailbox, or 
processed in some other way (eg, remailed to a list of people).  This is 
typically achieved by using the MTA's redirection facility ("sendmail" 
uses a file called ".forward" in your home directory) to send the 
arriving message through special software to process/recognise the 
message and handle.redistribute it appropriately.

An example of a software package to do this analysis is "procmail".

So the sequence becomes:

	User sends message to special username
	MTA prepares to deliver to special username, buts spots redirection
	Message is redirected into (eg) procmail for handling
	Procmail remails the message to a list of people

Note that this is fine if the list of people is to be centrally 
maintained by a human (they'll need to modify/update the procmail control 
file for the special username).

If you're after something that can handle a list and allow people to 
subscribe or unsubscribe from the list (semi-)automatically by sending 
e-mailed commands then you need to be looking at running some list 
serving software instead of using procmail.  Examples include "listserv" 
and "majordomo".

Hope this helps a bit.

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

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From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 11:21:17 -0700 (PDT)

> An example of a software package to do this analysis is "procmail".

I just wanted to mention one of the easiest ways to do this, if you are
the sys. mgr. or know the sys. mgr.  Sendmail also has a central aliases
file that can be used for this.  You can just put an entry in the aliases
file that looks like:

listname:  user1, user2, ...

and it will get redistributed.

Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle