rec autos automotive mailing lists how to set up your own archive name rec autos part new article as of february rpw many people want to set up mailing lists for their favorite automotive topics rather fewer know how to do it this article will provide the essential information for doing so on standard unix systems a shell script and examples of alias file setups are included which presently run on a sparc here at balltown cma com for a number of mailing lists note that if you do set up an automotive mailing list please let me know of the request address so that i can list it in the montly rec autos posting also inform the keeper of the usenet list of lists check news answers for this monthly posting first of all to get anywhere you need to either be a sysadmin or have some measure of assistance from your sysadmin it is also important that you have reasonably good network connectivity if it seems like you get everything several days after anyone else or that you have trouble getting email through then your network connectivity is probably not good enough listserv there is a handy automated mailing list package named listserv which is available from several ftp servers on the network details of the installation and operation of listserv are beyond the scope of this article but anyone who is considering running a large mailing list should probably look at listserv carefully the alias file on a typical unix system there is a file named usr lib aliases on whichever file server is your mail host it contains lines such as foo bar baz bletch which means that any email sent the name foo on that host is redistributed to users bar baz and bletch thus the simplest possible email list is my favorite car member member member my address my favorite car request my address this has a couple of problems the most noticeable one being that you have to be superuser to edit the alias file however you can do the following with the connivance of your sysadmin my favorite car include home mydir misc autos my favorite car list my favorite car request my address where the file specified is a list of comma and newline separated addresses this file can be in the list admin s home directory owned by the list admin bounced mail this still has a problem bounced mail usually gets distributed to all the members of the list which is generally considered somewhat irritating therefore the way that the driving school mailing list is set up is instructive thanks to harpal chohan of the bmw list for this setup by the way i m not sure where he got it from school request welty school rebroadcast include home newwelty misc autos school list school usr local adm bin explscript school owner school school request owner school out school request here s what is going on here the owner and request addresses are intended as traps for bounced mail coming from the network the request address also serves as the point of contact for administrative duties school is what people send mail to instead of pointing at addresses it points at a shell script which rewrites headers before resending the email school broadcast of which nobody except me knows the name the name has been changed here to protect my own sanity points at the actual list members the shell script i use is as follows bin sh cd tmp sed e reply to d e sender d e from d echo reply to balltown cma com echo errors to request balltown cma com echo sender request balltown cma com cat usr lib sendmail om f request balltown cma com f the mailing list rebroadcast exit note that this script does not know the name of the list the name is passed in from outside so that the script may be used for multiple lists i run several out of this site the script excises reply to sender and from lines from the incoming message substitutes for sender and reply to and adds errors to of all email bounce messages end up being sent to the request or owner addresses if this header rewrite is done for digested lists there is some digestification software around hopefully i ll be able to provide more information in a future version of this posting richard welty welty balltown cma com richard welty welty cabot balltown cma com nothing good has ever been reported about the full rotation of a race car about either its pitch or roll axis carroll smith
