Does the Ubuntu Newsletter still get sent over email?

I'm getting my emailed copy of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. It's published at many locations, including

  • Ubuntu Fridge
  • UbuntuForums
  • Ubuntu wiki

& more.

Traditionally posts published to Ubuntu Fridge (my first link) are mirrored to http://ubuntu-news.org/ , where an issue there does exist.

It was hoped that would be fixed Dec 26, 2020, but it wasn't possible, and with luck the fix will occur soon.

A number of feeds (eg. google use ubuntu-news.org for their info) have thus stopped at UWN issue 660 as that was the last post mirrored to ubuntu-news.org.

At this time, our next issue (#664) will go out in tuesday morning (my local time, <48 hours from now), and I'm hoping it'll appear on http://ubuntu-news.org/ as well, but I'll have to wait and see (ubuntu-news maybe back online later this week)

Email'd issues of Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter are being sent out, but after a number of returned emails, names on the list get removed. I don't have your email, so can't check if it's on the mailing list, but links to where you signed up may have been helpful in looking for reasons as to your not receiving copies. Emails go out

Reference in the question was made to a question which referred to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter so it was assumed it was that Newsletter which was being asked about. Instead it turned out in comments (below) it was a Canonical Newsletter signup, which is an ad-hoc publication used for marketing purposes. That newsletter comes out from the Canonical company (why you have to tick that you agree to receive information about Canonical's products & services) and is not a Ubuntu community newsletter.


You can read the newsletter by copying and pasting the address into your browser:

  • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue663

For previous issues just decrement the number:

  • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue662

Next week you would increment the number:

  • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue664

Use cron to email yourself the newsletter link

NOTE: This was updated January 24, 2021. If you copied the script before that please revise it.

You could make a cron job that incremented the Issue Number and emailed you a link every week. It does take a few steps to setup cron for emailing though:

  • How do I set Cron to send emails?

I made a sample bash script for cron to send a message each week with the Ubuntu Newsletter link. Create the script with sudo powers in /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter

#!/bin/sh
# 
# Note: Some bash commands (#!/bin/bash) won't work in shell (#!/bin/sh)
#       Shell scripts are preferred over bash scripts for cron jobs.

# Each week /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newletter will email new issue number
                
NextIssue=`cat /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter-issue`

[ -z ${NextIssue+x} ] && NextIssue=666    # First Time!

NextIssue=$(( NextIssue + 1 ))
echo "$NextIssue" > /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter-issue

echo "Weekly Ubuntu Newsletter is available for reading online:"
echo ""
echo https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue"$NextIssue"

Then do a quick setup and test:

$ sudo chmod +x /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter

$ sudo /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter
cat: /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter-issue: No such file or directory
Weekly Ubuntu Newsletter is available for reading online:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue666

$ ll /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 444 Jan  2 13:56 /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   4 Jan  2 13:57 /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter-issue

NOTE: After testing script for the first time use:

sudo chmod a+w /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter-issue

I had to use this on my system because the script doesn't give you write permissions to manually change the last Newsletter Issue number if and when you need to.

Each week cron will email you with the shell script's echo output:

Weekly Ubuntu Newsletter is available for reading online:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue666

NOTE: On my system cron weekly runs every Saturday. You can manually change the last issue with:

sudo echo 666 > /etc/cron.weekly/ubuntu-newsletter-issue

In this case, the next time cron weekly runs, it will email you issue number 667.

Tags:

Community

Canonical

Recent Posts