Documentation
MAILMAN 100 MBS Ethernet Mailer

System Requirements

  • Unix or Lynyx  operating system
  • Perl 5
  • Telnet Access

Preliminaries

  • Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.
  • Unpack the zip archive on your desktop using a program like WINZIP. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM. 
  • After you have unpacked the archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

File Locations

The following files will be uploaded into a SPECIAL HTML DIRECTORY which htaccess will control

bulkemailer.cgi
message.txt
sent.list
mailinglist.sorted

Configure the .cgi files

bulkemailer.cgi lines 19-21

$SENDMAIL='/usr/lib/sendmail';

$subject = "Hello Superscripts Member";

Point to sendmail on your system

File Access Permissions

File access permissions must be set correctly for this program to run. The table below lists the permissions of each file which are to be set by the unix command ( chmod ) used to set the correct access permissions. You must set the access permissions for each of these files.

 CHMOD 755

 CHMOD 777
bulkemailer.cgi mailinglist.sorted

sent.list

message.txt

Paste your formatted email body into message.txt

After composing your message in your favorite text editor simply upload your message as ASCII data (text only file) as message.txt

Explanation of utilities

  • mailing.sorted is an alphabetically sorted mailing list with duplicates removed. 
  • message.txt is the BODY of your email message
  • sent.list is generated after running bulkemailer.cgi and contains the addresses of everyone that bulkemailer.cgi has emailed

Send your list

To send your message simply execute the script from the telnet prompt

perl bulkemailer.cgi