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This is a C program to do "bulk" mailing. For input, it takes a file
of recipient addresses (one address per line) and a message (with
headers already attached) to be sent to the recipients. It sorts the
recipient list by reversed domain (so similar ones sort together),
splits up the recipients into several groups containing no more than N
domains each, creates an SMTP envelope for each group of recipients,
and feeds that envelope to "/usr/lib/sendmail -bs".
Splitting the envelopes up allows sendmail to perform delivery in parallel,
so instead of having one large queue entry (for which sendmail might take
awhile to get around to attempting delivery for some recipients), it has
several smaller queue entries. Depending on your point-of-view, this can
still be considered "cluttering up your mail queue", but it does seem to
deliver messages more quickly to most recipients.
The core of this program was extracted from a somewhat strange mailing
list manager called na-net; it was designed to efficiently send out
mail to 5000 people at a time. I have used this program to attempt
delivery of a message to over 12000 recipients around the world,
within a few hours. I'm currently using bulk_mailer as a back-end for
several mailing lists of modest size.
However, the program is not extensively tested, and may not work well,
in all environments. (In particular, if your system has per-user
process quotas, or a small number of process table entries, you will
want to modify this program to recover gracefully.)
bulk_mailer was designed to get around limitations of sendmail's
queueing algorithm. It may not work well with other MTAs.
In particular, use of bulk_mailer with qmail serves no useful
purpose.
(Qmail has exactly the opposite problem from sendmail: sendmail tries
to deliver to each recipient sequentially, but if there are multiple
recipients on a single host, it can optimize by only sending the message
once. qmail tries to deliver to all recipients in parallel, but if there
are multiple recipients on a single host, it wastefully sends a separate
copy to each. The combination of bulk_mailer and sendmail provides a
compromise between the two extremes - it splits the message up into
several parallel delivery jobs, but all recipients at a single host
get placed in the same delivery job, so sendmail can still optimize
this case.)
This program is Copyright 1995,1996,1997,1998,1999 by Keith Moore.
All rights reserved.
License to copy and use this program is granted according to the terms
of the current version of the GNU General Public License. However,
there is one exception: this program may not be used to send unsolicited
commercial messages.
There's no warranty on this, but you're welcome to use it if you want.
The latest version of bulk_mailer can probably be found in
ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/moore/bulk_mailer/
Installation:
a) type "./configure"
b) type "make"
c) copy bulk_mailer to wherever you want it to live. or
type "make install" to copy it to /usr/local/bin
Usage:
bulk_mailer [options] envelope_from recipient_list_file
bulk_mailer reads the message from standard input. The message
fed to bulk_mailer must be in valid RFC 822 and/or MIME format.
'envelope_from' is the envelope return address for the mailing list.
This should either be the address of a human list maintainer, or
the address of a robot that tries to recognize bounced mail messages
and grok it, forwarding anything it doesn't understand to a human.
'recipient_list_file' is a filename of a list of recipients, one
recipient per line. bulk_mailer's address prefrobnicator tries to
understand several forms of address, e.g.:
Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
moore@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
"Keith Moore" <"keith.moore"@cs.utk.edu> (Moore, Keith)
should all do the right thing.
Options:
-debug don't actually mail the stuff. instead, spit SMTP
to stdout
-delete-list-hdrs delete any List-* message headers from the input
this option is automatically set if any of the
-list-* options are set.
-domain dom.ain Set the local domain name. if not set, bulk_mailer
will try to figure out the name on its own.
Note: This should be a fully-qualified domain name --
not just the first component (aka the "hostname").
If the domain name doesn't have a '.' it's rejected.
-list-archive URL Add a List-Archive: header to the output.
See RFC 2369.
-list-help URL Add a List-Help: header to the output.
See RFC 2369.
-list-owner URL Add a List-Owner: header to the output.
See RFC 2369.
-list-post URL Add a List-Post: header to the output.
See RFC 2369.
-list-subscribe URL Add a List-Subscribe: header to the output.
See RFC 2369.
-list-unsubscribe URL Add a List-Unsubscribe: header to the output.
See RFC 2369.
-maxdomains ### set the maximum number of domains per envelope to ###.
if not explicitly set, 20 is the default.
-maxrcpts ### set the maximum number of recipients per envelope to
###. if not explicity set, 100 is the default.
This is used to work around a bug in RFC 821
and in many MTAs, which return a permanent error
code when the number of recipients in an SMTP
envelope exceeds some pre-set limit.
-maxsize ##### reject any message larger than ##### bytes.
-owner list-owner tell bulk_mailer the name of the list owner,
in case it wants to filter some mail.
-precedence xxx add a 'Precedence: xxx' header. 'xxx' should be a
keyword recognized by sendmail. NOT RECOMMENDED.
WARNING: some mailers will bounce the mail if they
see a Precedence header with a keyword they don't
understand; some list managers will silently drop
the mail if they see a Precedence header with a
keyword they do understand. There is NO safe value
for the Precedence header that won't cause some
mailer to mishandle the message. This option is
therefore not recommended.
-private if the header From address is not one of the
subscribers, and the -private flag is set,
refuse to send the message to the list.
-reply-to xxx add a 'Reply-to: xxx' header to the resent message
if there wasn't one in the input.
Use of the reply-to header by lists is questionable;
see http://www.unicom.com/FAQ/reply-to-evil.html
for some of the reasons why.
+reply-to yyy add a 'Reply-to: xxx' header to the resent message,
overriding any reply-to header in the input.
NOT RECOMMENDED.
If having a list use reply-to is questionable,
overriding the sender's reply-to header is even
worse. This option should be used only in very
unusual cases.
-s check for unsubscribe and similar commands
in the subject header or message body;
bounce to the list owner if it looks like
this is an administrative request.
-sendmail zzz Add the following flags to the sendmail command-line.
For instance, "-sendmail -Odq" would have bulk_mailer
pass the "-Odq" flag to sendmail, which tells it:
"just queue the message, don't attempt to deliver it
immediately".
-v Be verbose.
Use with sendmail:
To have bulk_mailer distributed mail to a list, add the following
lines to /etc/aliases:
{FOO}-request: whoever-maintains-foo
owner-{FOO}: whoever-maintains-foo
{FOO}: "|{BULK_MAILER} owner-{FOO}@{YOUR.DOMAIN} {ADDRESS_LIST}"
where {FOO} is the name of the list, {YOUR.DOMAIN} is your
fully-qualified domain, {BULK_MAILER} is a full path name of the
bulk_mailer program, and {ADDRESS_LIST} is a full path name of the
file containing the list of addresses.
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