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                    bulk-mail ver 0.1
                  
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1        Why bulk-mail

1.1      Did you ever feel handicapped by  current mailers when
         you wanted to send some  200+  mails as  bulk mail for
         all and sundry from your addressbook ? At Christmas or
         New Years perhaps ?
         
1.2      Did you ever feel handicapped in sending bulk-mail be-
         cause of some anti-spam policy of your ISP not permit-
         ting more than 10 mail-ds in your  To:, Cc:  and  Bcc: 
         fields combined?
         
1.3      If your MTA has been set up correctly and sendmail -t
         command is working, you have  nothing to worry.
         
2        What bulk-mail does

2.1      This script (bulk-mail) reads addresses from an input
         address file and mails it individually to each one in
         the addressbook with only a To: address as an indivi-
         dual mail. There are No Cc: or Bcc: addresses applic-
         able here. It  is a  personalised  mail, so no way of
         knowing who the other recipients are. This  may be of
         a disadvantage at times, but that is how this  script
         has been implimented.
         
2.2      The text message is read from a pre-composed external 
         file. The "From:" and "Subject:" lines  are  input in 
         an interactive mode when run.
         
3        The address file

3.1      The addressfile has some specifics. The format is:                 
         
         someone@somewhere.com
         somebody@somewhere.net
         .....
         nobody@nowhere.org
         
3.1.1    Please note the following:

         o No vertical spaces/ line gaps permitted
         o No commas at the end of each address
         o Only mail-id portion with @ sign are permitted.
         o This address is INVALID for bulk-mail:
           "My Friend" <myfriend@somewhere.com>         
         o This is a VALID address:          
           myfriend@somewhere.com
         
4        The program is totally interactive. If no parameters are
         entered, or -h or --help is entered, then you are shown
         the Usage/ Help screen.
         
4.1      You need to make an addressfile first and then a message
         file. Both should be ASCII files. HTML/ MIME/ attachment
         support is not built into the script. Then run:
         
         bulk-mail -a address-filename
         
         You will get the following prompts, to which you need to
         reply:
         
         o Enter From address ....
         o Enter Subject line ....
         o Message file name .....
         
         After that everything is automatic. Individual mails are
         made for each addressee in your address file, and mailed
         off using sendmail directly. Ofcourse, if you are not on
         line or the connection is poor, the mails may accumulate
         in your mail queue.
         
4.2      To check if all your mails have been despatched from the
         mail queue,  you may run "sendmail -bd". To enforce des-
         patch of mail in  /var/spool/mqueue run "sendmail -q" as 
         and when you are connected.
        
5        Importing addresses from addressbooks. 

5.1      Most addressbooks used by mailers like "pine" or "abook" 
         have their data saved in ASCII format. You need to iden-
         tify which is the file used by  your mailer addressbook, 
         and then extract only the address-id portion of the add-
         resses, not name portion. The script below is an example
         for extracting addresses from  pine addressbook  to  the 
         format suitable for use by bulk-mail.
         
         
         ---------------------<snip>-----------------------------
          
         #!/bin/sh
         # Change INFILE variable for your addressbook. 
         # The default ~/.addressbook is for pine.
         
         INFILE=$HOME/.addressbook
         OUTFILE=$HOME/address.bulk
         > $OUTFILE
         for i in `cat $INFILE`; do
             echo $i | grep "@" >> $OUTFILE
         done
         echo $OUTFILE" has been extracted for bulk-mail"
         exit
         
         --------------------</snip>-----------------------------

6        Enjoy .....
         
7        Licenses and other details.
         
         # (c) 2001 USM Bish <bish@nde.vsnl.net.in>
         # Released under GNU GPL v2 
         # See - http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
         # Version : 0.1
         # Contact : bish@nde.vsnl.net.in
                 
               
         
                 
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
                   
                 
   
           
         
                 
         
         
                         