Show HN: Postman – A command-line utility for batch-sending email | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Postman – A command-line utility for batch-sending email

github.com

48 pointszachlatta32 comments

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Name collision with http://www.getpostman.com/

Ah, didn't realize. Any new name suggestions?

Maybe a play on sendmail? Sendmuchmail?

Here is two suggestions based on translations of the word "postman";

postino: Italian postacı: Turkish

slight variations of what has mostly been said: ilpostino, mailman (there is GNU Mailman though..), postmen, postmann !

I prefer simple names like postal or mailer.

gopostal!

What about postalgusta as in megusta?

goingpostal (also a Terry Pratchett book)

Pat

Dispatch

spam-template-engine

Aeromail

Ghostman

postmaster

I'd change the example to reflect a more realistic use case: mails sent by Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker%2..., with name/insult pairs.

And for the purists among us, the GNU Mailutils package.

http://mailutils.org/

This looks really, really useful, and easy to use.

One feature-request: a flag to include an attachment. It's probably an edge-case, but I've recently taken over running an account that needs to send out a PDF of the organisations new programme about once per quarter. This would be the ideal tool for that, if I could include an attachment.

Cool! For a slightly different scenario, do you think there's a clean way to use postman to manage larger bulk emails with similar and different paragraphs other than trying to edit paragraphs in CSV? Sometimes I use my small project (https://github.com/bamos/yaml-mailer) to bulk email 10s of people with more personalization in each message, and I'd be happy to switch if a cleaner solution exists.

Example scenario: I applied to PhD programs ~5-6 month ago and liked to send emails to faculty members at each school I applied to telling them I was interested in their work by sending nearly the same email to everybody with a slightly different portion for their work.

Hmm, what if you could specify file names as a field in a row and have them automatically read and injected as the field?

Example:

I have the following CSV:

    Name,Email,Message
    Jane Doe,jane@janedoe.com,janedoe.txt
    John Doe,john@johndoe.com,Hello!

And the following template:

    Hello {{.Name}}! {{.Message}}

`janedoe.txt` reads:

    The weather is nice outside!

Generated output:

    Hello Jane Doe! The weather is nice outside!

    Hello John Doe! Hello!

Would that satisfy your use case?

Neat! Shamelessly, I'd like to mention that you may also consider using the email (https://github.com/jordan-wright/email) package I wrote to serve your backend. I've worked to make it as simple and robust as possible. However, if you're happy with gophermail, by all means use it! Both are great packages, imo.

Thanks for the recommendation! I've updated postman to use your package.

Edit: Hmm, I ran into an issue with the MIME type in my mail client (sup). I'll look into it, but have reverted the commit in the meantime.

I appreciate you giving it a shot. If the issue is with my package, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll jump on it ASAP. Happy to help any way I can!

So a friend and I built something very similar that hooked up to Mailgun and had a GUI interface. Spinning up instances of these for clients proved very lucrative for their, ahem, legitimate email purposes. The cool thing about integrating with Mailgun is easy setup and you get analytics that are useful for a/b testing and other things.

This is awesome! I'm loving all the new services/software that allow programmatic handling of email, I feel like that's one place where abstraction really helps.

why this over a cat | sed | sendmail < bcc distro_list?

* Both text and HTML parts

* All of the power of templates in Go (conditionals, etc)

* Some SMTP providers will complain if there are too many emails in BCC (generally >1000)

* Sends emails concurrently

Can you put this in your README?

Side question: says the tool is meant to send "html emails"; can it not also just do string replacement in any composed mail message, like a multiple MIME-part mail message that's composed by some other tool?

Right now it only explicitly supports HTML and text emails because it composes the multipart MIME message itself. Pull requests are welcome!

Also, added to README.

Would that get you a unique template fill for each recipient?

Yes, certainly it's a far cry from reliable, deliverable, multi-part HTML/plain, open tracking, click tracking, CANSPAN compliant, transactional email.

I use 'cat list | while read -r addr; cat text | mail $addr; done', which pretty clearly extends to filling in a template by using sed instead of cat and reading multiple variables from the file instead of just addr (IFS=, and it becomes a csv).

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