Re^2: Email To A List Of Addresses

[Milti]

Thanks for the responses. The form that I'm using is on my office computer and not readily available (I hope) to anyone else. The cgi program is located on a remote server.You are correct in that I would like to simply paste a list into a text box on the form as something like this:

John Smith ([e-mail])
Bill Jones ([e-mail])
etc
etc

Then I would like to put the "lines/addresses" in an array and utilize a foreach loop to send individual emails.

Does this sound reasonable or do I have to worry about a delimiter?

Once again, thanks for any advice you can offer.

[kennethk]

You have a delimiter there: newlines. Assuming they don't get passed through a layer that mangles white space at any point, it should work. Make sure to get your input box wide enough that you don't get bit by wrapping on

John Smith ([e-mail])
Bill Jones ([e-mail])     Bill Jones (bill_jones@hisc
+ompany.com)
etc
etc

Note that the security problem is not with the machine that views the form, but with the remote server. Anyone on the Internet could craft an HTTP request to fool your remote server into sending messages unless you, say, configure Apache to whitelist only service requests from your machine. Right now you can operate because no one has found your service, but security-through-obscurity is not a good model. Other than helping a spammer, the other major risk is that a spammer gets your server blacklisted. And that's presuming they don't take advantage of some obscure sendmail bug to own your remote server.

[poj]

If all the email addresses are enclosed in brackets then perhaps use a simple regex to extract them. Here is a basic test script to play around with. The added confirm checkbox lets you test before actually sending.

#!C:/Perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI ':standard';

my $MAX = 10; # maximum in list
my %list = ();
my $confirm    = param('confirm');
my $Email_List = param('Email_List');

# extract email adressess between ()
while ( $Email_List =~ m/\(([^)]+)/g ){
  my $addr = $1;
  
  # remove spaces and any other cleaning here
  # assuming you don't have unusual addresses like
  # "Any Person"@somewhere.com
  $addr =~ s/ //g; 
  
  # check valadity
  if ( is_valid($addr) ){
    $list{$addr} = 'Not sent'; #  using key avoids duplicates
  }    
}

# check not too many
my $msg;
my $no = scalar(keys %list);
if ($no > $MAX){
  $msg = "ERROR - $no is too many to send";
} else {
  # send emails if confirm checked
  if ($confirm){
    for (keys %list){
      $list{$_} = send_to($_); # store result
    }
  }
}

# input form 
print header(), start_html;
print qq!<h4>Recipients (maximum $MAX)</h4>
<form action="" method="post">
<textarea cols="80" rows="20" name="Email_List">
$Email_List
</textarea><br/>
<br/>
Confirm<input name="confirm" type="checkbox"/>
<input type="submit" name="action" value="Send"/>
</form><br/>
<span style="background-color:#ffff00">$msg</span>!;

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poj