Simple Email Lists

We have several "simple" email lists for notification-type messages of interest to a limited audience. It is intended to be used by automated tasks. The idea is to keep automatically generated notifications off the collboration-wide official mailing lists. Interested parties can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves and others, you need only have privilege to check out and check in to the Hall D Subversion repository.

The Lists

The roster of current lists can be found on the Email Lists wiki page.

Subscribing

If you would like to subscribe to one of these lists there are two methods for doing so.

Method A

Write an email to marki@jlab.org and say that you want to subscribe.

Method B

1. Check out the directory "listname" using the command:

   svn checkout https://halldsvn.jlab.org/repos/trunk/scripts/simple_email_list/lists/listname
   

   where "listname" is the name from the list roster.

2. In the resulting directory, edit the file "list.txt" adding your email address on a new line.
3. Check "list.txt" back in.

Unsubscribing

Reverse one of the subscription methods mentioned above.

Creating a New List

1. Under subversion, create a directory, for example my_new_list, under trunk/scripts/simple_email_list/lists:

   svn mkdir https://halldsvn.jlab.org/repos/trunk/scripts/simple_email_list/lists/my_new_list

2. Populate that directory (under subversion) with two files:
   • subject.txt: one line containing the subject of all mail messages
   • list.txt: email addresses, one per line

Installing a List

The following is not necessary, but sufficient:

To install in /home/user/simple_email_list

cd /home/user
svn checkout $HDSVN/trunk/scripts/simple_email_list

At JLab, the lists are installed in /group/halld/Software/scripts/simple_email_list .

Sending to a List

Assume in the following that simple_email_list was installed in /home/user/simple_email_list and the email list to which you want to send is my_new_list

1. Compose a message and call it message.txt (it must be called this).
2. Copy the message into the list directory

   cp message.txt /home/user/simple_email_list/lists/my_new_list/
   

3. cd into the list directory

   cd /home/user/simple_email_list/lists/my_new_list/
   

4. send the message to the list by executing the script specified below from the list directory

   /home/user/simple_email_list/scripts/simple_email_list.pl
   

Note that the script will destroy the copy of message.txt that it finds in the local directory. Since the script checks and will not send an empty message, this ensures that repeated invocations of the script will not send the same message over and over unless a new message.txt is explicitly copied into the directory.

---