lamer... how to send group email efficiently

lamer... how to send group email efficiently

[Harry Putnam]

Its a lamer question for 10+ yr gnus user but I've never had occasion
to send group emails.  Just not something I do.

Now I have need of a nice efficient way to send emails to a couple
dozen recipients... and looks as if I will be doing this every couple
of weeks.

The list of recipients will change over time but only by a few
deletions or additions... so it would be nice to be able to just add
or subtract email address' to/from something and gnus/emacs will do
the rest.

There must be a number of folks here who have developed nifty ways to
do this... please anyone share your technique. 

Re: lamer... how to send group email efficiently

[Glyn Millington]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Its a lamer question for 10+ yr gnus user but I've never had occasion
> to send group emails.  Just not something I do.
>
> Now I have need of a nice efficient way to send emails to a couple
> dozen recipients... and looks as if I will be doing this every couple
> of weeks.
>
> The list of recipients will change over time but only by a few
> deletions or additions... so it would be nice to be able to just add
> or subtract email address' to/from something and gnus/emacs will do
> the rest.
>
> There must be a number of folks here who have developed nifty ways to
> do this... please anyone share your technique.

Hi Harry,

From the Manual

|  2.10 Mail Aliases                                                        |
|                                                                           |
| The message-mail-alias-type variable controls what type of mail alias     |
| expansion to use. Currently two forms are supported: mailabbrev and       |
| ecomplete. If this variable is nil, no mail alias expansion will be       |
| performed.                                                                |
|                                                                           |
| mailabbrev works by parsing the `/etc/mailrc' and `~/.mailrc'             |
| files. These files look like:                                             |
|                                                                           |
|                                                                           |
|                                                                           |
| alias lmi "Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>"                    |
| alias ding "ding@ifi.uio.no (ding mailing list)"                          |
|                                                                           |
| After adding lines like this to your `~/.mailrc' file, you should be able |
| to just write `lmi' in the To or Cc (and so on) headers and press SPC to  |
| expand the alias.                                                         |
|                                                                           |
| No expansion will be performed upon sending of the message--all           |
| expansions have to be done explicitly.                                    |
|                                                                           |
| If you're using ecomplete, all addresses from To and Cc headers will      |
| automatically be put into the `~/.ecompleterc' file. When you enter text  |
| in the To and Cc headers, ecomplete will check out the values stored      |
| there and "electrically" say what completions are possible. To choose one |
| of these completions, use the M-n command to move down to the list. Use   |
| M-n and M-p to move down and up the list, and RET to choose a completion. |
\===========================================================================/


Of course, bbdb has it's own way of dealing with mail aliases.


hth



Glyn

Re: lamer... how to send group email efficiently

[Emanuel Berg]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> send emails to a couple dozen recipients ...

Put, on one line, this

alias friends "name_1 <f1@f1.com>, ..., name_N <fN@fN.com>"

in ~/.mailrc (it seems to be case-insensitive).

If you'd like to put additional info (like phone numbers), comment
with the hash/pound sign, like this: # don't mail this guy

To edit the file fast, you could use

(global-set-key (kbd "C-j") 'jump-to-register)
(set-register ?m (cons 'file "~/.mailrc"))

and then hit [C-j m].

To sort it, use `sort-lines`.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: lamer... how to send group email efficiently

[Emanuel Berg]

Oh, I forgot the most important thing - how to make it look cool.

Use (in .emacs)

(add-to-list 'magic-mode-alist '("# conf"  . conf-unix-mode))

and then put

# conf

as the first line of ~/.mailrc

Now, you can also comment with the familiar M-;

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573

Re: lamer... how to send group email efficiently

[Harry Putnam]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> Oh, I forgot the most important thing - how to make it look cool.
>
> Use (in .emacs)
>
> (add-to-list 'magic-mode-alist '("# conf"  . conf-unix-mode))
>
> and then put
>
> # conf
>
> as the first line of ~/.mailrc
>
> Now, you can also comment with the familiar M-;

Very nice, thanks for both chunks of input... very helpful.

Re: lamer... how to send group email efficiently

[Emanuel Berg]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Very nice, thanks for both chunks of input... very helpful.

No problem.

I thought about this, how to not send group *mails*, but *posts*
to several groups (crossposting).

For this, it seems the .mailrc file won't work as those aliases
only expands in the "To:" header, and to send to groups, the
"Newsgroups:" header is used.

Still, you can use the regular Abbrev mode, possible like this:

(kill-all-abbrevs)
(let ((write '(("Marquez" "Márquez")
               ("Diaz" "Díaz")
               ; ... setup whatever you need for writing ...
               ; ... has nothing to do with crossposting ...
              )))
 (define-abbrev-table 'text-mode-abbrev-table write)
 (define-abbrev-table 'message-mode-abbrev-table
 (cons '("rsb" "rec.sport.boxing, some.other.group") write) ))

This will - the last line will - get you all the normal writing
abbrevs is message mode, as well as the collective aliases (I
provided only one example)

(There are probably one million ways to do that.)

Anyway, as the message mode is used for both mails and Usenet
posts, perhaps the .mailrc file should be integrated in that
respect?

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573
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