[thelist] Sending e-mails

[Paul Waring]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 12:00:18PM -0000, Kevin Stevens wrote:
>             So what are my options here? How do people send out those 
> e-mails that say "undisclosed recipients" in the "To" box? I am not sure 
> whether I will be able to install a program on their server ( a Windows box, 
> if that makes any difference), so are there legitimate companies, preferably 
> in the UK, that will do this for them?

I believe they just send out an email with a blank To: header and Bcc:
all the people they want to receive it. This does still end up sending
out lots of separate emails though, because once the email gets to the
outgoing mail server it will be copied to everyone in the Bcc list (so
if you put 100 addresses in there, it's like sending out 100 separate
emails, except instead of doing them separately you're allowing the mail
transfer agent to do the legwork).

There are plenty of scripts out there in languages like ASP and PHP that
will run simple mailing lists for you - anything from sending out an
email to the addresses listed in a flat file to complicated systems
managed using a database and a web frontend. You can probably install
one of these without too much trouble.

As for companies providing this sort of service, you could look into
Yahoo Groups and the like, and one of my friends recently had a similar
problem, described here with a couple of solutions:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/davosmith/9983.html

Hope this helps.

Paul

-- 
Rogue Tory
http://www.roguetory.org.uk