Modifying the "To:" of outgoing SmartList messages
One of my users wants mail from his list to contacts at various news organizations to look like personal correspondence from him to the news contact. In other words, he wants the destination's name to appear in the "To:" header, and not the name of the list in "To:" and the destination's name in "BCC:". I still am encouraging SmartList use so that it can handle the bounces, although we'll have to subscribe and unsubscribe new changes through X-Commands. The appearance as personal correspondence doesn't have to hold up to close scrutiny of the mail headers, just to casual appearance in mail readers that just show "To:", "From:", "CC:" and "BCC:" headers. Is this an appropriate use of SmartList, or should I consider some other solution? If I use SmartList, where and how should I make these changes? I'm not real familiar with procmail commands, but I have all the documentation and could figure them out. Will making these changes break any other aspect of email operation or SmartList's ability to handle bounces? Thank you for all your help and advise on my problem. -Kevin Zembower
At 11:22 AM -0400 7/10/01, KEVIN ZEMBOWER is rumored to have typed:
Is this an appropriate use of SmartList, or should I consider some other solution?
This is not, IMHO, an appropriate use of SmartList. SmartList is designed to use uncluded externals to send the same message to "batches" of addressees at a time; what you want to do is send seperate messages to each addressee (as a seperate entry in the mail queue), changing the content of the message (the header is part of the message) for each mail. Therefore you would have to rework so much of SmartList that it would make more sense to write something yourself. (I've done much the same kind of thing for occasional use as a "prober;" a routine, in my case written in Frontier, that mails a message to every address in a database, changing the message for each user so the bounces are recognizable, even from brain-damaged forwarded addresses. It really isn't difficult to write, but I sure wouldn't want to use it for everyday use.) You are correct that you lose bounce processing by not using SmartList, although I can think of ways around that, they would all be kinda kludgy. SmartList is a great mailing list management software, whether discussion list or one-way broadcast list - but what your user appears to want to do is to send press releases personalized for each recipient, something SmartList was never designed to do. Charlie
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KEVIN ZEMBOWER