Re: bulk mailer

* Dave Sherohman <esper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [061212 18:00]:
On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 06:58:36AM -0600, Russell L. Harris wrote:

It appears that all of the Mailman documentation assumes that the
host has a valid publicly-accessible URL. If that is a
requirement, then I cannot use Mailman.

Well, yes, it is generally assumed (by any mailing list software)
that people are able to access the server running the list. What
you describe yourself as wanting to do should be possible without a
public IP address, just be aware that your subscribers will not have
access to many features of Mailman (web interface, setting their
subscription options without bugging you about it, etc.). On the
administrative side, Mailman's bounce detection will only be
partially functional (since it won't have any way to receive notice
of problems after the initial SMTP session), so you'll sometimes
have to identify and deal with defunct or otherwise dead addresses
yourself without Mailman's help.


Hi, Dave. Thanks for the explanations. I've been groping for a
solution, so several concepts were unclear and I had not stopped to
think about everything which a mailing list entails. I agree that it
is desirable to give each subscriber the ability to unsubscribe
himself.

Now I realize that I have two different needs. The immediate need is
to send out a one-time letter of invitation to an address list which
is several years old. Many of the addresses may, by now, be invalid.
The subsequent need is to allow those who are interested to subscribe
to a mail list.

I think that the simplest approach to the immediate need is to employ
the simple bash script which invokes "mail" suggested by David E. Fox,
with the alternative being the perl script of J.A. de Vries. The
alias feature of Mutt may fail with a long list of addresses.

Regarding the long-term need, I just discovered that one of the many
ancillary services which accompany my web site hosting plan (from
lunarpages.com) is a mail list implemented with Mailman; it has been
sitting there all this time, just waiting to be used.

RLH


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