I think geeking ADDS to sociability, aka tech help

[jack]

Suppose I had a spreadsheet with columns name, email, and message, and I have a windows computer and an account on a unix server. What do you think the easiest way to turn that into n emails is?

Comments

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

Turn off the windows computer, open the spreadsheet in OpenOffice on the Unix system, save it as CSV, and write a quick script to send the spam.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'm required to have the windows computer running for my job, but otherwise ok :)

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

Skin it to look like a Mac. Excel can export to CSV though.

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

And probably do the mailing via some sick VBA thing. Although is any sensible admin finds a Windows machine sending lots of email via MAPI Jack might find his machine off the network fairly quickly.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Well, not *lots*. VBA probably can do it, actually, but for some reason I'm leery of trusting it :)

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

Actually, I wrote a VBA thing to do exactly that many years ago. Oh for hindsight!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it probably is one of the standard examples. But it will require me configuring outlook.

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

If you need to do this more than once, you could look at the OOo scripting to automate the .xls -> CSV conversion:
http://udk.openoffice.org/python/python-bridge.html
Some examples or a mostly integrated package that looks like it requires minimal extra scripting.

(All from googling, rather than experience).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Probably rarely enough that that wouldn't really be a bottleneck. I think. THanks.

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

CSV -> perl script

something like (and I can't remember the API for Mail::SMTP so I might be wrong)


use Mail::SMTP

while(<STDIN>)
{
@fields = split(',', $_);
$mess = new Mail::SMTP::Message;
$mess->to($fields[0].' <'.$fields[1].'>');
$mess->from('Bob');
$mess->body($fields[2]);
$mess->send;
sleep(1);
}


Keep the sleep() call in there unless you want to be killed by your postmaster.

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

Assuming you don't have any commas in the middle of your CSV records. There is a "message" field in cartesiandemon's spec. Probably safer to use the Perl CSV module.

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Well opviously any code posted into LJ comments is sanity low-passed :).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I can easily use something-else separated; or I can recast my sentences to use semicolons; or I could strip up to the second comma ...

Wait, can you have commas in email addresses? :)

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

This is why I like TSV.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Though there could be an argument for $weird-character-separated, not that I *would* use tabs...

Wait, can you have tabs in email addresses? :)

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Good point. Which is the weirdest character?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Well, if you could use unicode... :)