Subject: How do I send a text file to 600 people?

From: Song Han <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 18:36:04 -0800 (PST)

Hi, 

I have 600 e-mail addresses in this format (each line ends with a RETURN): 

[email-masked] 
[email-masked] 
[email-masked] 
........ 
........ 
........ 
........ 
[email-masked] 

How can I send a text file to all 600 people?

Thanks, 

Song 

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---

From: "Aaron S. Hawley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:45:20 -0500 (EST)

i'm going from my head but try this:

send the file to yourself (or just Fcc it) view the file, press T to take
the addresses, press list mode press A to Select All (press X on any
addresses you don't want to take, like your own), press T to take
addresses and save all these addresses as a distribution list and give
it nickname.  that should help you out a lot.

aaron

-- 
SPAM - Un-solicited Email Sucks
"People who send Spam Suck!"

---

From: "Nick Birkett (x8289)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 22:05:38 -0500 (EST)

As a recipient of these directed mass e-mails (usually from professional
societies to which I belong), one annoyance is having to
scroll through a list of 600 e-mail addresses before reaching the
message.  I would encourage you to use a method which 'hides' the address
list.  I do this by creating an alias on our UNIX system which I can
access using a single e-mail address (eg. maillist).  Then, the message
gets sent to everyone on the list but none of the recipients sees the full
list of people receiving the message, just the address I use.  I don't
know if the method below will similarly 'hide' the full list of
recipients.

On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, Aaron S. Hawley wrote:

> Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:45:20 -0500 (EST)
> From: "Aaron S. Hawley" <[email-masked]>
> To: Pine Discussion Forum <[email-masked]>
> Subject: Re: How do I send a text file to 600 people?
> 

========================================================================
Nicholas Birkett, M.D., M.Sc.
Epidemiology and Community Medicine
University of Ottawa                        [email-masked]
451 Smyth Rd.,                              (613)-562-5800 x 8289 (voice)
Ottawa, Ontario,                            (613)-562-5465          (fax)
Canada.   K1H 8M5
=========================================================================

---

From: "Aaron S. Hawley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 22:30:06 -0500 (EST)

to hide annoying addresses use the "Lcc:" field.

aaron

---

From: "Mike A. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 22:26:07 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, Aaron S. Hawley wrote:

>From: Aaron S. Hawley <[email-masked]>
>Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Why does your signature, not match the intentions in your
response?  Talk about your contradictory emails...

----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mike A. Harris  -  Linux advocate  -  Free Software advocate
          This message is copyright 2001, all rights reserved.
  Views expressed are my own, not necessarily shared by my employer.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Press every key to continue.

---

From: "Mike A. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 22:23:41 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, Song Han wrote:

>Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 18:36:04 -0800 (PST)
>From: Song Han <[email-masked]>
>Subject: How do I send a text file to 600 people?
>
>
>Hi,
>

In short - you DONT.

Just in case the short story doesn't explain it clearly, I've
forwarded this to the local admin of usc.edu so he can describe
to you the LONG story of just why you do not want to do that.

The short version of his long story will likely be along the
lines of:

[[email-masked]]$ ssh -l root usc.edu
[[email-masked]:~]# userdel -r han
[[email-masked]:~]# exit
$ /usr/games/quake/quake

SPAM is SPAM is SPAM.  Stop SPAM.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mike A. Harris  -  Linux advocate  -  Free Software advocate
          This message is copyright 2001, all rights reserved.
  Views expressed are my own, not necessarily shared by my employer.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
If you're looking for Linux books, guides, and other documentation, visit 
the Linux Documentation Project homepage:  http://www.linuxdoc.org

---

From: Edward M Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 17:49:34 +0800 (GMT)

> In short - you DONT.

There are very few absolutes in this world.  I would modify your statement
to say, "Normally, you don't/shouldn't".

However, one of the hats that I wear is network/email admin for about 400
people.  At times I do need to send messages and sometimes files to my
"customers".

While 400 is a slight bit less than 600 even 600 would be small to a
"real spammer".

A "real spammer" wouldn't waste their time using pine or any other UA to
ply their trade.  They'd simply pull spamming SW off the net and set to
work after they pay a few $ for millions of email addresses....some of
which may even be valid.  :-)

--
Edward M. Greshko
Technical Manager            Syntegra Asia Region

---

From: "Nick Birkett (x8289)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 06:16:07 -0500 (EST)

> >How can I send a text file to all 600 people?

I HATE Spam too.  However, there can be legitimate reasons for sending a
mailing to a group of 600 people.  I subscribe to e-mail distribution of
Table of Contents from various journals, list of grants available from the
NIH, professional societies who use e-mail to reach their entire
membership list with announcements, etc.  These are not abusive.

Spam only relates to mass e-mails to people you have not asked to get the
e-mail.

---

From: "Mike A. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 12:11:25 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Nick Birkett (x8289) wrote:

>mailing to a group of 600 people.

And someone needing to do so would likely know how to do so, or
could ask someone at the local help desk.

Asking on a public mailing list without mentioning the purpose,
in the context that it was done very much appears to be a spammer
in training.  If it was indeed legitimate, I would have expected
a "disclaimer" of sorts describing the legitimate use.

Universities have helpdesks to handle these sorts of problems.

>I subscribe to e-mail distribution of Table of Contents from
>various journals, list of grants available from the NIH,
>professional societies who use e-mail to reach their entire

I'm not arguing that all uses of sending 600 mails at a time are
abusive.  I'm saying that the person asking for help looks like a
spammer in training and made no effort to make anyone think
otherwise.  If I am wrong, then I apologize for being so, however
I do not in any way think my assumptions are unjustified.  I get
30 to 70 spam *every day*, so I am quite anti-spam.

If I receive spam originating from usc now, I know where to turn.
;o)

>Spam only relates to mass e-mails to people you have not asked to get the

Sure, and judging the message, that was likely to occur IMHO.
Again, if I am wrong about the intent - the poster was not clear
enough to start with on this sensitive info.  Kindof like someone
asking how do you mix chemicals to make an explosive that could
kill 5000 people on a mailing list that discusses gunpowder.
They could be using the info to blow up rocks, but at a power
that could potentially kill 5000 people.  If someone said however
"How do I make an explosive that could potentially kill 5000
people" the response would be similar to my own.  If the intent
was to blow up rocks, and only use people as a guaging factor,
then one should clarify that, lest they be misunderstood.

I also will note that lots of people are jumping in to the
defense of the poster yet nobody knows what the intent was at
all, and there has been no response (that I've seen yet)
indicating the intent or lack of, so I am sticking with my
initial assumption which I think is wholly fair.

In this case, I would rather err on the side of caution and
perhaps make a misjudgement just to fight spam, than to help the
person, perhaps misjudging their intent and help them to spam.
If they truly need to send an honest message to 600 people, they
can find out how to do so quite easily anyway, it isn't rocket
science really.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.  ;o)

Take care,
TTYL

----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mike A. Harris  -  Linux advocate  -  Free Software advocate
          This message is copyright 2001, all rights reserved.
  Views expressed are my own, not necessarily shared by my employer.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports
on it, you know they are just evil lies.
  -- Linus Torvalds

---

From: Song Han <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 11:26:56 -0800 (PST)

I hold a PhD degree in Computer Science and now act as a program chair for
an international conference. I need to send e-mails to 600 people
who submitted papers, telling them several decisions: deadlines,
accept/decline, final photo-ready versions, etc.

I have checked the man page of pine, but it does not say how to
send an e-mail to a group (hiding the addresses). I felt very bad when you
sent so many e-mails to admins in the department, the
school, the university. Anyway, I thank all for helps.

Song

---

From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 11:51:25 -0800 (PST)

If the suggestion to use the (T)ake command didn't work, or you're having
other problems with getting the addresses into an address book entry (and
then into the Lcc: field), I'll be happy to answer any additional
questions you have on this subject.  I'm sorry so many people jumped to
unfounded conclusions regarding your motives, but I can understand their
paranoia as an unfortunate consequence of the prevelance of Spam.

Let me know if you need any further help on this issue.
-- 
Scott Leibrand
[email-masked]            (Yes, that is a valid address.)
http://students.washington.edu/leibrand
* Opinions expressed are mine.  Everyone else can get their own.   :)   *
* RCW 19.190 notice: This email address is located in Washington State. *
* Unsolicited commercial email may be billed $500 per message.          *

---

From: Jacob Morzinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 15:00:15 -0500 (EST)

> accept/decline, final photo-ready versions, etc.

There's no easy, universal answer.  The "LCC" field is almost right,
but it's not guaranteed to work at your institution.  (Do a small scale
test first, if you try use it.)

There are a number of individual, site-specific answers for how to send
mail to many people without overwhelming the message with headers.
Your local help staff may know your local way of accomplishing this.
Particularly if you open with a paragraph resembling the one above
("I'm a program chair; I need to send information to 600 people"),
they may be more likely to know exactly what you're trying to do.

 -Jacob Morzinski

---

From: Mike Walker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 12:17:57 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

>accept/decline, final photo-ready versions, etc.

MM supported putting a mailing list in a file and sending
to @filename;  I don't think pine supports that.  Try
creating an alias for them in your address book.

>school, the university. Anyway, I thank all for helps.

To hide addresses, put them on the Bcc: (blink carbon copy) line.
So enable your bcc: prompt.

---

From: "Mike A. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 15:29:24 -0500 (EST)

>school, the university. Anyway, I thank all for helps.

Well then, probability has worked against me it seems.  ;o)  In
all fairness, my assumptions were not irrational.  Perhaps I
could have been more patient, however I have a very hair trigger
when it comes to SPAM.  I get _way_ too much spam, and the odds
leaned in the SPAM direction heavily - at least from my
viewpoint.

Also, in all fairness, I apologize for getting on your case about
it and not trusting your intentions.  Please understand my strong
dislike for SPAM, and try to put yourself in my position also.

Now that you are in "not a spammer afterall" status, I hope we
can clear the water, and forget about the whole thing and move
on.  Sorry if I've caused you any problem.

Take care.
TTYL

---

From: "Mike A. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 16:40:47 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Scott Leibrand wrote:

>Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 11:51:25 -0800 (PST)
>From: Scott Leibrand <[email-masked]>

Since he's now confirmed that his request was honorable, and my
assumptions were in fact wrong.. an idea hit me:  Why not turn
the tables, and use SPAM tools for holistic purposes?

Download some SPAM software for Linux, and use it for non-spam
purposes.  ;o)  In other words, use SPAM software to send your
legit email to 600 people.  Just audit the code first to make
sure the software doesn't 'share' your mail list with other spam
people.  ;o)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mike A. Harris  -  Linux advocate  -  Free Software advocate
          This message is copyright 2001, all rights reserved.
  Views expressed are my own, not necessarily shared by my employer.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Fun thing to do as root, in the root directory:
chmod -R 666 *
Just as bad as rm -rf *, but more fun.
"The files are all there, but I can't do anything with them!"
And you can't change permissions, since chmod isn't executable either. :-)

---

From: David Dyck <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 13:42:02 -0800 (PST)

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Song Han wrote:

> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 11:26:56 -0800 (PST)
   ....
> send an e-mail to a group (hiding the addresses).

I think that there is something that could be improved here, as the man
page ( nroff -man pine.1 ) for pine is only 396 lines.  The man page
does mention the on-line, context-sensitive help, but the internal file
pine.hlp is 20966 lines (of which only 10890 are unique, but that is
still quite a read.)

Has anyone created any tools to take pine.hlp and generate a tree of
html files that could be passed to a search tool?  What about taking
the pine.hlp text and creating a large 'flat' file with index that

The man page doesn't mention the Pine FAQ at
  http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/index.html
no does it mention the users guide.
  ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/docs/user-guide.txt
or the getting started file(s)
  ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/docs/Getting_Started.ps
(the user-guide and getting_Started files seem to be a few years old
though)

At least the getting started file does discuss distribution lists,
but it doesn't mention the Bcc or Lcc commands.

I guess I learned most of pine by experimenting with the commands and
reading the online help, which is the way that getting started also
suggests that one learn more about pine.

Perhaps those that learn by reading instead of experimenting and exploring
with the program would be better served by a more prominent mention of
the Pine Information Center's web page at
  http://www.washington.edu/pine
earlier in the man page.

What do you think?

  David

---

From: "Aaron S. Hawley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 19:32:03 -0500 (EST)

i find it humorous that people are using a discussion mailing list to
bitch how much they hate SPAM.  <smiley>

i technically started this discussion (with my .sig), so do i get to stop it?

crazy germans think they can vote spam away:
http://www.politik-digital.de/spam/en/

---

From: "N.A. Prakash" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 14:35:10 +0500 (GMT+0500)

Here is a novice's small script to send email to multiple recipients as
separate, individualized messages. (You did mention already having the
list of recipients as a text file with one address to a line.) But this
one uses the mail program on Unix systems, not Pine. Dont know if it
helps. To reduce load on the mail server, maybe you can send the mail in
batches of say 25 or 50, with a gap of say 15 minutes between batches. 

prakash
N. A. Prakash, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore

-------------Script start----------
#! /bin/sh
#Script multimailer, for sending a message to multiple recipients
#Prakash, 10 December 1997
#Tell user what it does, if new to it or if parameters not supplied correctly
if [ ! $# = 3 ]
  then
  echo
  echo "OOPS, wrong syntax!!!"
  echo
  echo "This shell script lets you send a message to multiple recipients."
  echo "Each recipient will see only his/her name as recipient."
  echo "It is useful when you have a list of many addresses, and want to"
  echo "avoid repeating the operation or letting a recipient see many names."
  echo "To use it, you should have, in the directory where you run this," 
  echo "(i) an ascii file with all the valid addresses, EACH ON A LINE BY" 
  echo "ITSELF, (ii) an ascii file containing your message."
  echo
  echo "USAGE:  multimailer param1 param2 param3"
  echo 
  echo "Here param1 is the name of the file that contains the recipients' "
  echo "addresses; param2 is what you wish to have in the Subject field for "
  echo "your message - PLACE THIS WITHIN DOUBLE QUOTES; param3 is the file "
  echo "that contains the mail message. Separate the params with a space." 
  echo
  echo "This script uses mailx, not pine.  So your message will not be in"
  echo "the sent-mail folder in pine.  However, the script will create a"
  echo "log file with the date of sending, the message, and the list of"
  echo "addressees in your home directory for record."
  echo
  exit
fi
#The action
for i in `cat $1`
  do
    echo "mailing $i"
    echo
    echo "If you wish to abort, type Control-C within 5 seconds."
    echo "Any mails completed before abort operation WILL be sent!" 
    echo
    sleep 5
    mailx -s "$2" $i < $3
  done
#Log the action
logfile=~/multimail.`date +%d%h%Y,%R`
now=`date +%d%h%Y,%R`
echo "Sent following msg under Subject "$2" on $now " > $logfile
echo >> $logfile
echo `cat $3` >> $logfile
echo >> $logfile
echo `cat $1` >> $logfile
exit
#Finis
------------Script end---------------

---

From: Gopi Sundaram <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 10:51:22 -0500 (EST)

On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, N.A. Prakash wrote:

> Here is a novice's small script to send email to multiple
> recipients as separate, individualized messages.

That places a massive load on the mail server, and is not scalable.
Having a single message with multiple recipient will move this load
downstream from your own mail server. This is not a problem because
the same load will be moved downstream regardless of whether one uses
multiple-recipient messages or multiple messages. It simply eliminates
the load on your mail server.

-- 
Gopi Sundaram
[email-masked]
http://www.cse.sc.edu/~gopalan/Pine/

---

From: Frank Tobin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 11:00:57 -0600 (CST)

David Dyck, at 13:42 -0800 on Tue, 23 Jan 2001, wrote:

The proper way to handle this would be to not put the information into a
manpage, which is too flat for the purposes needed, but rather to use
info(1) pages, which are hyperlinked, and better for lots of documentation
on things such as how to use CVS, etc.

-- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.uiuc.edu/~ftobin/