how to send email to multiple users which are grep'ed from a text file

vamshi krishna · 07-02-2015, 03:46 PM

I have a database of users called employees in the format of firstname:lastname:email

bob:marley:bob.marley@gmail.com
nikki:minaj:nikkithedash@gmail.com
sachin:tendulkar:sachin.india@gmail.com

I grep'ed these values into a text file called email using
cat employees | cut -d":" -f4 > emails

Now the file has all the email ids in the file emails
cat emails
bob.marley@gmail.com
nikkithedash@gmail.com
sachin.india@gmail.com

Now if I have a relatively bigger database of 1000 users and I have 1000 email ids in the emails file. How can i send emails to 1000 users at the same time??
Please help
Thanks

HMW · 07-03-2015, 01:24 AM

Short answer: You probably CAN'T send 1000 e-mails at the same time, because most ISP's have limits on their outgoing connections to avoid SPAM and such.

Long answer: If it were me, I would use Python and smtplib, read all e-mails into a list, loop the list and send each e-mail with a PAUSE (for say 7 seconds) after each mail has been sent.

There might be other ways, but that's how I would do it from the command line.

If you have access to a GUI, I suggest Thunderbird in combination with Mail Merge.

Best regards,
HMW

eklavya · 07-03-2015, 05:15 AM

Are body and subject of all mails same? if yes, you can write a shell script for it like

Code:

#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'\n'
ARRAY14=( $(cat emails) )
for i in "${ARRAY14[@]}" 
do 
echo "Mail Body" | mail -s "Mail Subject" "$i"
echo "Sent mail to $i"
done

You can write Mail body and mail subject. You can use two more variables as body and subject and write detail content.
You can use "read" command to use different body and different subject for each recipient.
You can enter body and subject from a text file. You can use multiple text files to choose different body and different subject for different recipients.

There may be multiple options to send mail, you need to understand your requirement and how do you want to utilize resources.