Subject: Long headers

From: Les Wallis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 14:46:59 -0800 (PST)

Hi all. This is a query about how to get rid of LONG headers when messages
are being sent to big groups. 

Sorry it's so long, but I have to explain what we are trying to
achieve.

Here at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind in Melbourne,
Australia, we have about 170 staff divided into six Departments. 

We in the IT Dept have written a script which takes information on staff
name, extension and log in from a foxplus database and automatically
creates a new global pine address book and copies it to all sites every
time the list changes.

The global address book first has an individual listing of each staff
member - we use telephone extension numbers as nicknames and add another
symbol where two or more staff share the same extension (e.g. 455. 455_
445' etc) because pine will not work properly if any nicknames are
duplicated.

Then we create a group for each department with nicknames such as ALL_ADM,
ALL_EMP etc, and finally we create an ALL_RVIB group comprised of the
nicknames of all departments. 

Trouble is, when someone sends a message to all staff the header on the
message is a couple of screens long before the message starts.  This is
particularly annoying for our vision-impaired staff using speech adapters
etc, but we have taught people to use the W whereis command to search for
the word Subject - this works well except where people forget to give
their message a subject!

We have also designed a grep script which will strip out all this garbage
except the name of the sender when messages are printed out.

Can anyone suggest a way we can customize Pine to stop global messages
being preceded by this address garbage? I can think of a couple of kludgy
ways, but can someone suggest something elegant?

A second problem is that when you do create these very long lists you can
sometimes create a group too long for Pine to handle, and the address book
bombs out when you try to use it. 

So far we have gotten around this by creating shorter aliases for sites
e.g. calling our burwood site bwd so the addresses there can appear as
fred@bwd instead of fred@burwood, but we could still run into trouble as
the number of staff with e-mail increases (and since we have had Pine they
are using it with great enthusiasm and numbers are increasing daily!)  

Again I suppose we could kludge this by dividing the Burwood site (which
is one Department) into two or more sub-groups, but again I am looking for
the elegant solution.

Thanks for your patience if you got this far - I look forward to advice
from experienced Pine gurus.

Les Wallis 
IT Manager
RVIB Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 09:54:31 +0100 (BST)

> ways, but can someone suggest something elegant?

Assuming you have a distribution list set up and are using Pine 3.93 or
later:

1.  Start composing the message.
2.  Put the cursor on a header line and type ^R to see the Rich Headers
    (all available to you).
3.  Type the distribution list's nickname into the "Lcc:" field.
    (This will automatically fill in the "To:" field with the full list
    name, and the "Bcc:" field with the list of recipients.)

When the message is sent out the recipients will only see names listed in
the "To:" and "Cc:" fields; those in the "Bcc:" field will not be
included/shown.

If you have an older version of Pine then put the distribution list alias
directly into the "Bcc:" field (the "Lcc:" field was new in Pine 3.93 (or
possibly 3.92 -- I forget)).

> bombs out when you try to use it.

Ummm... I had heard that Pine could cope with distribution lists of up to
a thousands or so recipients.

Some people have reported problems when trying to send a mesage to more
than about 20 recipients.  These cases have invariably been problems not
with Pine, but with a buggy release of the system mail delivery software
(sendmail).

I think you'll need to send a message to the list with a more detailed
explanation of this problem and any error messages you are seeing (say
whether they appear when you include the distribution list, the moment you
send the message, in a message returned to you shortly after sending your
message, etc).

Cheers,

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/

---

From: Don Sugarman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 07:33:35 -0400 (EDT)

> are being sent to big groups. 

In Pine, I think all you have to do is to place the mailing list in the
bcc line of the header.  (old pine, put sender's address in To, otherwise
sendmail (?) will assume something needs to be put there)

Have you tried creating a forward file in your mail incoming directory,
e.g., /var/spool/mail.  Your global distribution script could generate
this *one-line* file (e.g., deptlist) of the form 

Forward to <addr1> <addr2> ... <addrn>

and your message would be addressed to 'deptlist.'

If you have Pine set up to check for valid local users, you would need to
set up a corresponding passwd file entry for deptlist.

I don't have sysadm privileges anymore, so I can't test this out.  But we
used to use this approach in support of a project with a very large
distribution list.

Don Sugarman
[email-masked]

---

From: Les Wallis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 09:26:58 -0800 (PST)

> the "To:" and "Cc:" fields; those in the "Bcc:" field will not be
Thank you. That works very well. But as to mt second problem - viz

> send the message, in a message returned to you shortly after sending your

The problem is specifically this. The long list to which I refer is in a
global addressbook built by an external utility. The error happens the
first time Pine encounters that global addressbook. I can't remember
exactly what the error message was, because we have fixed it by shortening
the addresses, but it was related to the fact that, within the global
addressbook file, the text line which represents a group containing about
fifty e-mail addresses was too long.  You say, however, that Pine should
be able to deal with groups of thousands .. and I believe you! Perhaps
when Pine is creating groups itself from user input it can start a new
"line" now and then within the same group to cope with this problem. 
Perhaps I should externally create an addressbook with a group near the
known limit, then get Pine to add more names to the group - then look at
the file to see how Pine has got over the problem?

---

From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 19:50:36 -0700 (PDT)

> the file to see how Pine has got over the problem?

Yes, there is a line length limit of 1000 characters.  You're idea is a
good one.  You don't have to create a huge list to see how pine wraps long
lines, though, just a list which is long enough to cause the line to be
more than 70 or 80 characters.  If you have any lists in your address book
you probably already have some that are wrapped (lines beginning with
spaces).  Thanks.

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

---

From: [email-masked] (Rob Funk)
Date: 24 Jul 1996 18:01:27 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>are being sent to big groups. 

One option would be to use the Bcc field for the groups, instead of
the To field.  Then the recipients don't see the list of everybody
getting the message.

Another option would be to use an external list server that remails to
everybody on the list.
-- 
=========== R o b  F u n k ===========|===========> [email-masked] <===========
 "Why are you here?  Snap out of it.  [email-masked]
  Wake up.  It's all illusions."      [email-masked]
 "I LIKE THE MOVIE"  -- Richard Bach  |http://er4www.eng.ohio-state.edu/~funkr

---

From: Beth Peterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 10:01:32 -0500

On 24 Jul 1996, Rob Funk wrote:

|>Hi all. This is a query about how to get rid of LONG headers when messages
|>are being sent to big groups. 
|
|One option would be to use the Bcc field for the groups, instead of
|the To field.  Then the recipients don't see the list of everybody
|getting the message.
|
|Another option would be to use an external list server that remails to
|everybody on the list.
 -- =========== R o b F u n k ===========|===========>[email-masked] <=========

The problem will still be there (from what I know)  if you only use the Bcc
field.  What happens is that anyone who you put into the To field will not see
what is in the Bcc field but, anyone in the Bcc field WILL see what is in the
Bcc field. If you can tell everyone (or at least most) to do the following
when they end a message it will work.  What you do is you DO put the list in
the Bcc, Cc, or Lcc field then in the To field put in a ":;" (a colon followed
by a semi-colon) and that will do the trick for you. 

Hope this helps!

Beth Peterson
bethp@fnal
Physics Department

---

From: Les Wallis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 13:49:05 -0800 (PST)

It's me that started this one. I received the advice to place the cursor
on the Bcc field, then insert the nickname of the large group (60
addresses) putting nothing in the To: field. I can tell you that it DOES
work (in 3.93) at least with groups; all the recipients see is the group
nickname in the To: field, instead of three pages of addresses, and that
is what I wanted to achieve.