best/easiest commandline email program for mass-email

[Alex Janssen]

Hal Burgiss wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 03:09:46PM -0500, Alex Janssen wrote:
>   
>> I must send personalized email to our clients, about 2500.  So I figured 
>> on putting together each with a shell script and then sending the file 
>> with a commandline email program.  I was looking for suggestions on what 
>> might be the best package to install for this.  I have seen a suggestion 
>> for a program called "mail", but I can't figure out what package to 
>> install to get it.  I looked at the list presented by Synaptic, but 
>> there's a boat load of programs related to email.
>>
>> If anyone has done this sort of thing, I'd sure appreciate your suggestions.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alex
>> -Ubuntu 9.10 on several computers since version 5.04
>>     
>
> As mentioned, the mailx packaged (I think) contains the 'mail' command:
>
> cat $email_list |while read email;do
> 	cat $boiler_plate | mail -s "$mysubject" $email
> done
>
> Also, there is a command line version of mutt, which can handle attachments.
> So I use mutt for attachments, otherwise just 'mail'.
>
> You can also echo text directly to "sendmail", but you have to build your
> headers from scratch. Not as difficult as it sounds:
>
> ( echo "From: $from"
>   echo "To: $to"
>   echo "Subject: $subject"
>   echo "Reply-To: $replyto"
>   ! [ "$cc" == "" ] && echo "Cc: $cc"
>   ! [ "$bcc" == "" ] && echo "Bcc: $bcc"
>   echo "$x_lines"
>   if $HTML; then
>    echo  "MIME-Version: 1.0"
>    echo "Content-Type: text/html; charset=\"ISO-8859-1\""
>   fi
>   # Add required blank line to separate header/body.
>   echo
>   # Body goes now ...
>   cat $tempfile
> ) | $sendmail $ffrom
>
>   
In your example above, what is the $ffrom parameter to $sendmail?  From 
what I read, that would be to whom the mail is sent.  Is that just a 
dummy parameter?

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