Email List in workflow

Hi,

I got a new custom workflow with an external task which sends out a newsletter (in HTML mode in email body) to the user community through email. It has a list of odd 350 users who would receive this newsletter.

For all the previous workflows we have currently, the email address list was pretty small, less than 10 addresses or a email distribution group, which was easy and I used to specify those addresses directly in workflow template file (.wft).

What is the best approach to have those 350 email addresses in the above workflow? Any suggestions? I don't have the option to create email distribution group on this occasion.

Thanks

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Comments

CRB

i would say: go back to the code which sends out the emails and modify it to read your email list from a text file. you can append all the email addresses with a ; between each address.

Migrateduser

I have had trouble sending emails when the character count for the "To" field is greater than 256 characters, so you might find that you have the same problem. You might consider making an email alias that contains all of the 350 people. That way you can use a single email address that maps to all the users.

Adam Stoller

I have had trouble sending emails when the character count for the "To" field is greater than 256 characters, so you might find that you have the same problem. You might consider making an email alias that contains all of the 350 people. That way you can use a single email address that maps to all the users.

Alternatively - depending on the mail code you're using - a number of the Perl modules take a reference to an array of addresses and presumably take care of formatting them correctly for sending the email (occasional newline-tab's interspersed between the various email addresses)

jeffldavis2

I think I will go with Dave's suggestion using email alias.

one more thing, does teamsite allows emailing to external address such as yahoo, gmail? Because I have some users with those email addresses to receive this newsletter.

ghoti, I am using iwsend_mail.ipl for emailing.

teamsite 6.1 win 2003

thanks

nipper

one more thing, does teamsite allows emailing to external address such as yahoo, gmail?

TeamSite doesn't care. However MOST companies have external email relay turned off for most servers due to spam concerns.

Talk to your server admins and ask if the mail relay you are using has permission to push to external sites.

Adam Stoller

ghoti, I am using iwsend_mail.ipl for emailing.

iwsend_mail.ipl uses Mail::Mailer to send the email, and Mail::Mailer accepts a reference to an array of scalars (email addresses) to be provided for the header elements (e.g.: to field) and should do the right thing - however, I'm not entirely sure how you would get iwsend_mail.ipl to know about hundreds of addresses to use ... would you enter them all in as task-level variables or command-line arguments?

If you do go this route (you already said you'd probably go the dist-list route, which is probably cleaner) - then I think you'd have to create a copy of iwsend_mail.ipl and modify it to take a parameter for a file list of recipient addresses so that you could handle the processing of all those email addresses internally rather than trying to pass them from the WF to the script as individual parameters.

jeffldavis2

iwsend_mail.ipl uses Mail::Mailer to send the email, and Mail::Mailer accepts a reference to an array of scalars (email addresses) to be provided for the header elements (e.g.: to field) and should do the right thing - however, I'm not entirely sure how you would get iwsend_mail.ipl to know about hundreds of addresses to use ... would you enter them all in as task-level variables or command-line arguments?

If you do go this route (you already said you'd probably go the dist-list route, which is probably cleaner) - then I think you'd have to create a copy of iwsend_mail.ipl and modify it to take a parameter for a file list of recipient addresses so that you could handle the processing of all those email addresses internally rather than trying to pass them from the WF to the script as individual parameters.

Yes, you are right!! I am using the copy of iwsend_mail.ipl (sorry I missed it in the previous post) in an external task to send email and sending the array reference as an argument.

my @iw_sendall="dist-list1@test.com, dist-list2@test.com";

__INSERT__(get_cmd("iw_Newsletter_mail.ipl", @iw_sendall));

thanks