I know I am late with this, but I hadn’t checked in on Philip’s blog recently and just stumbled on this thread today.

I want to thank Joel for the reference to the mail merge/email tool in Word. I just gave it a try, and it works great for my needs!

Also, someone mentioned the security feature that forces the user to click “Yes” over and over again for each email — After a few minutes of googling, I found out that this only happens when you select “plain text” or “attachment.” If you select “HTML,” the emails are sent without having to verify permission each time.

Oops! Error: the correct command line is this:

send/only to-block read %mail-list.txt read %message.txt

Or refined:

send/only/subject to-block read %mail-list.txt read %message.txt “My subject”

BTW, a really big mail-list can be mailserver sorted, due server performance reasons.

This SQL query may helps the task:

# SQL query by Ari Stopassola Jr.
# Order emails by server.

SELECT DISTINCT
email,
SUBSTR(email,(POSITION(’@’ IN email)+1),(LENGTH(email))) AS ordered_email
FROM mail_table
ORDER BY ordered_email;

;The puzzle solved in one line, in Rebol language  www.rebol.com). No need sendmail and others bad programming things:

send/only read/lines %mail-list.txt read %message.txt

; Rebol really rox!

Phillip, I think that the power of the weblog is reserved for those who are truely popular (the causes of popularity being many). I suspect that the majority of your readers (Mr. Spolski being the only exception I immediately recognize) would find that any questions they posted on their weblogs would go quite a while before they were even read, let alone intelligently answered.

Shimon, my script takes the messagefile and the addressfile as arguments, as well as the subject line (as specified in Philip’s post). It’s no coding achievement, but you have hardly cloned it. Which is too bad because I’d like to see how this is done in shell.

I love Perl dearly, but this is a job for the Unix shell. First, we’ll clone your massmail script in one line. Next, we’ll add support for combining groups of friends. I have used these for my own parties.

Suppose you have your email addresses in a file called emails.txt, and the message is in message.txt. The command is:

for e in `cat emails.txt`; do mail -s”Party at Philip’s Tonight” $e < message.txt; sleep 5s;done

(The “sleep 5s;” introduces a delay between message sending. Having read that my ISP, Comcast, thinks bursts of email-sending indicate a virus-infected machine and will shut off outgoing mail server access, the delay may be prudent. But feel free to take it away.)

Now, let’s extend this. Suppose you have multiple lists: nerds.txt, students.txt, and singlebabes.txt. There is probably no overlap between nerds and singlebabes, but a member of either group could be in students. Challenging? Hardly:

for e in `cat nerds.txt students.txt singlebabes.txt | sort | uniq`; do mail -s”Party at Philip’s Tonight” $e < message.txt; sleep 5s;done

The programs used–cat, sort, uniq, mail, and sleep–should be available on any Unix machine. Hope this helps.

Frank: I will, of course, make the extended script available. But “eventually” means “at the very least after I get back from Greece”. So I probably won’t touch the code for at least a few months.

Michael: I did invite 183 people. One is a friend who moved to Shanghai but still asks to be kept in the loop. I don’t expect him. I don’t think more than 50 have ever shown up to one event and that was spread over 4-5 hours so there were never more than 40 guests in the apartment at any moment. I have a 4.5-ton air conditioner…

Given a text file of email addresses recips.txt and the body of the email message in message.txt, the Rebol code would be:

foreach mail read/lines %recips.txt [send to-email mail read %message.txt]

This script would run identically on 40+ platforms on Rebol’s small 300Kb interpreter. Rebol is built specifically for cross-platform network scripting & DSL building, http://www.rebol.com

183 people, in a condo with no elevator? You’re kidding, right?