Bulk email programs?

[ffutures]

Once a year or so I need to send out an email to a large number of registered users, basically reminding them to update their snail mail address if it has changed, since I will be sending them a disk in a few weeks.

It's always been a pain to do because I don't have any sort of bulk mail program and don't want to use CC or BCC; CC gives the recipient a load of other email addresses, which breaks the data protection act, while a lot of spam trap software is set up to stop mail that's been sent to a BCC address.

Can anyone point me at a program (not a mailing list service, since that would also be against UK data protection law) that will take a list of say 500 email addresses and send the same message to each one as the sole recipient? Preferably one that won't trigger all sorts of spam trap alarms? Free or cheap would be nice too, since it'll be used once a year or less. I can use Windows or Mac OS-X 10.4

Thanks!

Comments

[coth.livejournal.com]

This is the kind of thing Tim Illingworth originally set up smofs for - does he still offer the service?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

All sorts of data protection issues with a 3rd party service, plus Tim is heading off to the USA some time soon, so that's not really going to work.

[johannes-d.livejournal.com]

I've used mail merge in MS word to do something similar. The only problem has been that my service provider objects if they go in large batches but I have been able to send batches of up to about 20

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'll have to look at that, see if there's a way to do it and send plain text rather than a Word file or whatever,. Thanks for the suggestion.

[johannes-d.livejournal.com]

If you set up a csv file with email addresses and any individual information and use that with the mail merge too in word to generate suitable emails then if you merge to email using the address from the csv file. Word will send plaintext emails. You do need a suitable email client set up for word. Outlook or outlook express are word's favourites.

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

mail on macos X will probably do it for you.

Put you email body in email.txt, and your list of addresses in emailaddresses.txt.

Eg, from the macos x terminal type:-

$ for email in `cat emailaddresses.txt`; do cat email.txt | mail -s "Subject" $email ; done

I think this will also work for html email, but I restrict myself to plain text for ease. (and use mutt (and linux) rather than mail , but I don't think they are much different in this respect)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

How do you list the email addresses - one per line in ASCII text?

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

That's usually the simplest, but any whitespace separator will do.

That incantation cant cope with email address with spaces in them without a little more magic. But email addresses very rarely have spaces - I don't think I can ever remember coming across one.