[Mailman-Users] mailman as bulk mailer.. variables in body?

[Nigel Metheringham]

claw at kanga.nu said:
> Mailman is really not the tool for this.

Definitely....

> What you could do however is use Mailman to generate the MTA spool
> entries and then use Exim as the MTA with a filter installed that does
> the mailmerge at the point and time of delivery.  This is actually not
> that difficult to do (tho fiddly to debug/test).  The Exim/VERP guys
> are doing something very like this IIRC. 

You don't need to hack the body when doing VERP, so the typical VERP 
config would not be suitable for this.   You *could* do it with exim, 
but its probably a case of additional pain for not much gain.

I would personally do this using a small (I would guess 30-50 lines 
max) perl script (sorry Barry - old habits die hard and I have all the 
stuff to do this sitting in my perl toolbox).  You have one input file 
with the list of addresses and any other replaceable variables, the 
other input file would have the message template.  The script would 
read the control file a chunk at a time and apply it to the template 
and send the output to the MTA.  The HTML::Template (will do other text 
based stuff), and the Mail tools packages will do all the work (or make 
the template include the SMTP commands to and just shove all the output 
to "sendmail -bS" (BSMTP handling).

	Nigel.

-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
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