email

I recently needed to send an email to many people¹.

Putting all of them into the BCC field did not work (mail rejected by provider) and when I split it into 2 emails, many did not see my mail because it was flagged as potential spam (they were not in the To-Field)².

I did not want to put them all into the To-Field, because that would have spread their email-addresses around, which many would not want³.

So I needed a different solution. Which I found in the extensibility of emacs and wanderlust⁴. It now carries the name wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer.

You simply write the email as usual via wl-draft, then put all email addresses you want write to into a buffer and call M-x wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer. It asks you about the buffer with email addresses, then shows you all addresses and asks for confirmation.

Then it sends one email after the other, with a randomized wait of 0-10 seconds between messages to avoid flagging as spam.

If you want to use it, just add the following to your .emacs:

(defun wl-draft-clean-mail-address (address)
  (replace-regexp-in-string "," "" address))

(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers (addresses)
  (loop for address in addresses do
        (progn 
          (wl-user-agent-insert-header "To" 
            (wl-draft-clean-mail-address address))
          (let ((wl-interactive-send nil))
            (wl-draft-send))
          (sleep-for (random 10)))))

(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer 
    (&optional addresses-buffer-name)
  "Send a mail to multiple recipients - one recipient at a time"
  (interactive "BBuffer with one address per line")
  (let ((addresses nil))
    (with-current-buffer addresses-buffer-name
      (setq addresses (split-string (buffer-string) "\n")))
    (if (y-or-n-p (concat "Send this mail to " 
            (mapconcat 'identity addresses ", ")))
        (wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers addresses))))

Happy Hacking!

Das hier funktioniert seit dem Wechsel von web.de auf nur-SSL für mich nicht mehr. Ich habe noch nicht herausgefunden warum. Mein Bug-Report dazu.

Die Einrichtung von Emacs zum Verschicken von E-Mails hat mich etwas Zeit gekostet.