FAQ: How do I use the bigmail program?
| Bigmail is a script that's used to mail a message to a list of addresses. 1. Create a text file named "recipientlist", which contains the addresses, one recipient per line. 2. Create a second text file named "mailtext", which contains the text of the mail you wish to send. 3. Determine a short descriptive subject line for the email message. 4. While logged on to Project Vincent, enter the following commands at the prompt (%), substituting your subject line for "subject" below: % add mailutil % bigmail recipientlist mailtext "subject" Mail sent to any invalid addresses will bounce back to you since you are the sender of the mail. ========== Hints and Tips If you wish to follow bigmail's progress on the screen and log it at the same time, enter the following command: % bigmail recipients mailtext "subject" |& tee -a mailing.log where "mailing.log" will contain a copy of what the bigmail process writes to the screen. ----------- If you create the files with Word or Excel, make sure you save them in a text-only format. Use FTP to upload these files to your Project Vincent account. After uploading them, you need to convert them from a DOS format to a Unix format. The commands to do this are: % add public % d2u recipientlist % d2u mailtext ----------- Bigmail sends out 100 messages, waits 2 minutes, then repeats the process until the recipient list is exhausted. It takes a few seconds to send the messages, so you can expect to mail out about 2,500 messages per hour. If you are using the isua.iastate.edu system to do this mailing, you will need to break the list into one- or two-hour "chunks" because of per-process cpu limits. | |
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