[YLUG] Questions about mail servers

[Rob Hall]

Morning all,

I've just successfully set up my first mail server which I'm dead
chuffed about. Steep learning curve but it works! I'm using Postfix and
Courier and I've set up a Squirrelmail webmail service. All the virtual
names and domains are held in a MySQL database.

My question is how to go about setting up what I suppose are mailing
lists for the server. I want to send a welcome email to all the users
(currently about 1000 but soon to rise to about 1900) with the purposes
of being not only a nice introduction for them but also serving the
purpose of sending an initial email so that the webmail service works
for them (doesn't like mailboxes to which no email has been sent yet) Is
there a relatively simple way of achieving this? I've tried setting up
an alias of welcome at foo.net to *@foo.net but the logs tell me that
*@foo.net doesn't exist.

I'd like this to be as automagic as possible (i.e. if I add new users,
they are automatically sent the email and added to what ever mechanism I
use to send to welcome at foo.net) but I also only want to allow certain
users to have the ability to send to that email address (i.e. I don't
want spammers to be able to send mail to welcome at foo.net and effectively
spam all my users). I also want to be able to send important maintenance
and admin messages to all the users from time to time. 

Any ideas gratefully received!

Ta

Rob Hall