Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 08:24:39 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG, jrsysadmin@empireone.net, khetan@os.org.za, mark@intrepid.net Subject: Re: Mass Email Message-ID: <199910251524.IAA21309@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <00d501bf1f0a$05667d00$e9c276d1@empireone.net>
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>From: "James" <jrsysadmin@empireone.net> >Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 09:57:28 -0700 >I have to make a change on our system. >How do I go about emailing all of the users on the system >with out giving each of my users my user list? There are various approaches. Basically, you need to arrange for the mail to be sent in a way that doesn't include the individual addresses in the (retained) headers. And since you're asking the question, I would presume that you also need a way to generate a list of users' email addresses. (A way to avoid this latter concern is to have a mailing list -- probably moderated in such a way that only certain folks are permitted to send mail to it -- that will contain the addresses for each user. Updating it could be a regular part of account maintenance.) One way I ahve accomplished the latter concern is to go through the "password" data (we use NIS; the same considerations apply for it as to reading the local /etc/passwd file), extracting the information for all users within a certain range of UIDs, then using a hand-maintained "stop list" to cull the entries that should not remain. As for generating the mail... bear in mind that you do not want the tools you use to do this to be too accessible: as with most such tols, they have their good uses (as you intend), and they have not-so-good uses; a typical one that applies in this case is spamming. With that warning, if you have a working sendmail configuration, you could just fabricate a file: From: jrsysadmin@empireone.net Reply-To: jrsysadmin@empireone.net Subject: Upcoming changes Bcc: address0 Bcc: address1 ... Bcc: addressN This is the body of the message. Except for this paragraph, it contains no self-referential material. .... then feed it (as stdin) to "sendmail -t" (probably as root). sendmail will take care of inserting the Date: and Message-ID: headers. Another approach would be to make use of majordomo (for example), especially if you already have majordomo (or a similar mailing-list manager) running. But as above, you would do well to ensure that only selected, trusted individuals are permitted to send material to that list. Cheers, david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com UNIX System Administrator voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (888) 347-0197 FAX: (650) 372-5915 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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