Mailing List

dmaranan has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Here’s the task: I need to create a perl script that extracts e-mail addresses and unique information for each of those e-mail addresses and then sends the e-mail to the user. For example, here’s the data that would be sent as a form or possibly read as a text file:

anon@hotmail.com Tom
anon@msn.com Dick
anon@yahoo.com Harry

I need an e-mail sent to each of those users with their names. How should I approach this task? Would it be better to create a text file contains that info and then have perl read that data and send an e-mail? Or should I do is at a cgi-script? Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

Comment on Mailing List

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Mailing List by zakb (Pilgrim) on Oct 15, 2001 at 19:46 UTC
For the physical emailing, see Mail::Bulkmail. It can do all your mailing list handling, including customising the message aka 'mail merge'. Whether or not you mail from a text file or via a CGI depends on whether or not you need to do it from a web page.	[reply]
Re: Mailing List by blackjudas (Pilgrim) on Oct 16, 2001 at 00:16 UTC
Well, honestly the structure of your script is completely up to you, you can read in from the text file, cache the results and send MIME:Lite into a loop and send the bulk of your mail, if you do it as a CGI script, I'd imagine that you'd want it pretty much like an admin script that has a big button that you hit and sends an email to everyone in your list. If you're asking about having to use CGI to e-mail, no as long as you have a working mailer on the computer you're running the script on. Either way it's up to you. Please post code if you have a specific logic/syntax problem. BlackJudas Update: Cross-post from deleted node.	[reply]