Re: [Exim] Getting lists of users from odd databases?

On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Yann Golanski wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 11:46:16AM +0000, D.M.Chapman wrote:
> > We are finally going down the route of an all-staff and an all-student
> > email list (the acceptability of this can be argued elsewhere - I am
> > "argued out" :-). We currently have a mojordomo server that we hope to
> > replace with mailman over the summer. the lists need to be working (for
> > trials at least) before the Summer vac.
>
> How are your students downloading mail? If it is via POP there is a
> clever trick (tm) you can do -- basicly check if the last time they
> logged was before the new newsletter and if so, copy it to their
> maildir.
>
> Otherwise, it's a mailman setup I'm afraid.


We do some mass mailing to all our customers, but we use neither of
these approaches. We have the list of email addresses, and I just use
some scripts to assemble appropriately sized SMTP batches with
appropriate envelopes and headers that we just pipe into exim -bs

Advantages of this include there being no actual email address that
forwards to the list, that we then have to protect an outsider from
sending to, and we don't have to base our POP server choice on
availablity of the 'bulletin' feature (Nor do our customers HAVE to use
POP, we also use IMAP, and a few legacy souls use pine).

The only disadvantage is that the PHB that composes the massmail has to
pass it to an admin for sending rather than being able to send it
himself. This might also be considered an advantage, depending on how
you look at it. We could theoretically come up with a WWW/CGI interface
to permit the PHB to do it directly, but so far it hasnt been enough of
an issue to warrant that.