On Sat, 4 Nov 2000, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> Peter Radcliffe rearranged electrons thusly:
>
> > Suresh Ramasubramanian <sureshr@???> probably said:
> > > Try a perl script like bulk_mailer (and use one of the mailmerge scripts
>
> > bulk_mailer has several known issues, and is generally not recommended
> > unless you like dropping mail on the floor.
>
> Could you suggest an alternative? I'd like a perl script to run in
> conjunction with majordomo (this is for a list server)
Maybe bulk_mailer has changed, but if you are using majordomo and exim,
just follow the advice in the exim FAQ which in turn points to a
majordomo-exim FAQ.
If I recall correctly bulk_mailer does two things.
(1) It breaks up mail otherwise sent to hunderds or thousands of
addresses into smaller batches, where each message is sent to
say, 20 addresses.
(2) It can sort addresses so that nearby and well connected domains
(as specified by the user) are listed first.
(1) can be achieved by using "remote_max_parallel" in the exim
configuration. And (2) can be achived by setting remote_sort
It may be fixed now (because I sent of a fairly bad (quick and dirty
patch), but one of the several problems with bulk_mailer was that if /tmp
was full, you simply lost your mail. (note that /tmp was hard coded, it
didn't use mktemp or rely on $TEMP, so if you had a small /tmp and a large
/var/tmp, bulk_mailer would fail this way often).
In general it had terrible error checking and handling, so the calling
process never knew that bulk_mailer had failed. I had lists where
messages went into sendmail with no DATA at all (actually sendmail -t
EMPTY-FILE ADDRESS) so sendmail made up headers from the envelope and sent
that out to all list members. Poor system monitoring on my part lead to
it taking a shamefully long time for me to realize that this was
bulk_mailer and a full /tmp (everything else used /usr/tmp, so I didn't
see other failures).
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg
I have recently moved, see
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/contact.html
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
