how mailing list works.

[mooi-kuan]

Hello,

I would like to understand how does the mailing list, FAQ list etc works, that allows email sent to the system to be read and sent back to the sender/others automatically. One example is the blank email that I sent to iux_faq@hpfcdn.fc.hp.com to get the ignite FAQ list.

Instead of using ftp, I hope there is a way to dynamically retrieve any file remotely through email. That is, for the above example, giving a filename path in the mail content will allow the file to be sent back to the sender as attachment. Will there be any scripting involved, if yes, I would prefer the answer in sh,ksh or perl.

Thank you !

[Anthony Goonetilleke · Accepted solution]

You have asked about 5 different questions in one email :-)

A mailing list has nothing to do with ftp it is maintained on a system and its a piece of software that allows people to subscribe/unsubscribe etc. The most common piece of software is majordomo for list management.

There is nifty things you can do with sendmail to give autoresponses i.e you can add entries in the /etc/aliases file to automatically send responses to any incoming email.

There are also other utilities that can retrive files and uuencode them and send them via email be careful with these as they can be a security risk if not setup properly

[Albert E. Whale, CISSP]

There are Many Tools which will allow you to develop File retrieval through E-Mail. One very popular tool is called Majordomo. It is a Mailing list manager which you can configure for retrieval of files, via E-Mail commands.

Hope that Helps.

[Anthony Goonetilleke]

Have a look at this it is a good starting point to majordomo

http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/majordomo-faq.html

[Anthony Goonetilleke]

Here is another helpful link it is the majordomo admin guide

http://www.cqu.edu.au/itd/ib/majoradm.html

[BOSCHIAN Xavier]

You can check also the "listar" software wich is more easy to configure than majordomo : http://www.listar.org