CLUB1 Newsletter

A very simple newsletter for CLUB1 server members. This was first only used for the club official newsletter and later extended as a service for members.

The design strategy of this piece of code is to take advantage of Postfix .forward files combined with recipient delimiter.

Features:

• subscribe and unsubscribe using emails
  • email confirmation at subscription
• store subscribers email addresses in a file, separated by new lines
• no web interface

User setup

Configuration folder

The configuration is stored under this folder:

~/.config/newsletter/

emails              must be readable and writable
.secret             must be readable
signature.txt       must be readable
settings.json       must be readable

emails will be filled with each email that subscribed to the newsletter.

Fill .secret with a long sentence.

Fill signature.txt with text that need to appear at the end of each email. This will be placed after a -- signature separator.

Settings is a JSON file that contain some metada about the newsletter. Three fields are allowed: title, and displayName.

{
  "title": "news from alien kitchen",
  "displayName": "Mysterious alien"
}

Where title is the official name of the newsletter. It will be used during sign up phase. displayName is the email associated display name in the From field.

From: DISPLAY_NAME <[email protected]>

Forwarding

User home directory must contain 3 files:

FILE                      CONTENT
.forward+subscribe        | "SCRIPT_PATH subscribe"
.forward+confirm          | "SCRIPT_PATH confirm"
.forward+unsubscribe      | "SCRIPT_PATH unsubscribe"

Where SCRIPT_PATH is the full absolute path to the newsletterctl script. For example: /usr/local/sbin/newsletterctl.

Override config path

The newsletterctl can take an optionnal argument that is used to override config path.

newsletterctl [-c CONFIG_PATH] SUB_COMMAND

CONFIG_PATH is a path to the config folder. That must contain all config files as described in setup.

Usage

send newsletter

./newsletter [-c CONFIG_PATH] SUBJECT [CONTENT_FILE]

Where:

• CONFIG_PATH is the folder containing the config (default is ~/.config/newsletter)
• SUBJECT is the subject of the letter
• CONTENT_FILE is the file containing the newsletter text. An alternative method is to transmit the content through STDIN using a pipe.

This will send a newsletter to every mail addresses listed in the emails file in config folder. The default From address will use your club1 username like this [email protected], but can be overidden using the settings file. If you define a displayName in settings.json, it will be displayed in the like this:

DISPLAY_NAME <[email protected]>

If a title is set in settings.json it will be used as a prefix in each newsletter subjects under square brackets (even during subscription and unsubscription).

Install

Default install location is /usr/local (also known as "PREFIX"). newsletter will be copied in bin subfolder and newslettertcl in sbin subfolder.

make install

One can override the default location like this:

make PREFIX='/some/path' install

This is usefull for developpement.

During installation, {{PREFIX}} in scripts is replaced by the given PREFIX. We've done that beccause the script are invoked by Postfix with a limited PATH. To resolve this, we only use full absolute paths in our scripts.