[BlueOnyx:25017] Re: Bulk mailing

[Colin Jack]

Morning Michael,


On 22/07/2021, 20:39, "Blueonyx on behalf of Michael Stauber" <blueonyx-bounces at mail.blueonyx.it on behalf of mstauber at blueonyx.it> wrote:

    Hi Colin,

    > I want to email all users on one of our servers to warn of some
    > disruption during upgrades.
    > 
    > I haven’t done this for years but seem to remember there was a quick and
    > easy way of doing it in the past.

    You can do this via email forwarding on a BlueOnyx. Create a new account
    somewhere. For example let us create user 'mailall'.

    Then you activate email forwarding of that user and forward all emails
    he receives to (for example) your support account.

    Then you run a conglomerate of shell commands to get a list of all users
    and append that list (properly formatted) to the .forward which user
    'mailall' has.

    Like this for example:

    cat /etc/passwd|grep '.sites'|grep -v mailall|grep -v '\-logs'|cut -d :
    -f1|sort -n|awk {'print "\\"$1'} >> ~mailall/.forward

    Please note that this is with a user named 'mailall' in mind. We exclude
    his user name from the output and we append to his .forward file at the end.

    The aggregated user names are added in this format:

    \admin
    \s1_admin
    \s1_berta
    \s1_dora
    \s2_admin
    \s2_info

    So they all have a backslash in front of their username.

    When you now email to user 'mailall', it forwards the email to every
    user in the .forward file.

    That's why it's *REALLY* important that you get rid of that .forward
    file as soon as you're done. Turn off email forwarding in the GUI and
    make doubly sure that your ~mailall/.forward is gone or at least no
    longer has the list of all users.

    Because otherwise you just created a dream scenario for a spammer. With
    one email he could reach all your users on that box in one shot as well. :p


Thanks. This rings a bell in my distant memory! __

I will give that a go ... and delete it afterwards!

Kind regards

Colin