SUMMARY: munging Email addresses for support

From: Peter L. Wargo (plw@ncgr.org)
Date: Wed Sep 09 1998 - 19:14:25 CDT


** Original Q:

As usual, the folks I work with come up with interesting questions.

We have several products that are to be released soon, and they're unhappy that
I want to stop the old practice of having a user account dedicated to the
support of the producct that people can log into, read email, etc. (Of course,
"everybody" ends up knowing the password.)

For incoming mail, an alias or open majordomo setup works fine. But, they want
outgoing mail to appear to be from the support Email address. For mass
mailings, majordomo works fine, because you can set the reply-to: address to be
the name of the list. (Actually, they gripe about the fact the the sender name
is still theirs... No pleasin' some people....)

But, what to do if you want to mail just one or two people and have the
reply-to: (and from:) address to be from the support address instead of the
user?

One thought I have bouncing around is a perl script that takes the name of a
text file (message body), the subject, and either a file or command-line list of
addresses then communicated directly with our sendmail hub to build a mail and
send it out. (Essentially, plugging the support Email address in as the mail
from: header.)

Seems like this wouldn't be too hard to whip up, but it got me wondering if
anybody else has been in the same boat, and if there is a better solution. Drop
me ideas, and I'll of course summarize.

**Final Solution:

Well, it looks like a perl script using sendmail -t (or -f, depending) is a good
idea, although I may shortcut things and still use telnet to port 25 from the
script. (or mconnect.) Seth Rothenberg sent me a good example, and I gleaned
another from the PERL column in Performance Computing.

** Thanks to:
Jamie Lawrence <jal@ThirdAge.com>
"David Evans" <DJEVANS@au.oracle.com>
"Scott D. Yelich" <scott@spy.org> // Yes, I RTFM'd "sendmail" :-)
Shawn Laemmrich <swlaemmr@mtu.edu>
Simon Falvey <sfalvey@uk.oracle.com>
John Berninger <jberninger@bbtnet.com> // I'd *love* to tell them that!
Seth Rothenberg <SROTHENB@montefiore.org> // Thanks for the example!
Shriman Gurung <SG@datcon.co.uk>
Jay Lessert <jayl@lscpdx.latticesemi.com>
Jochen Bern <bern@penthesilea.uni-trier.de>

-----------------------------------------------------------
Peter L. Wargo / plw@ncgr.org / +1 505 995 4476 (FAX: 4475)
Group Leader, Systems Administration
The National Center for Genome Resources
1800-A Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87505 (USA)
http://www.ncgr.org



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