Sending BULK Emails

[Canman2005]

Hi all

 

I wondered if someone can give me some advice.

 

Basically I have this little newsletter system, I do a PHP QUERY to return all rows in a newsletter table and then run a PHP mail for each row returned.

 

I have started to get a few people signing up and recently I ran my script and my host moaned that I used lots of bandwidth and tied the server up, he suggested I get the script to send out 10 mails every 5 minutes to avoid this happening.

 

How could I get my script to just return 5 rows, wait 5 mins and then return another 5 rows and then repeat that again until no more rows are returned.

 

Can anyone give some good advice?

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Fruct0se]

I have had the same problem and as a result I wrote a program which will do this and it is available on gemscripts.com

 

[Canman2005]

thanks but I was kinda looking for a simple script and something I didn't have to pay for, only because their is no budget for me to buy anything.

[Fruct0se]

Well, if you have a script which sends mail already you can use header refresh to reload the script multiple times until the job is done, you can set the script to refresh every X amount of seconds. You will need to pass a variable to the script each time it refreshes to indicate where it left off in your mailing.

 

Then use that variable as the offset in your SQL query.

1'st script load send 5 emails - headers refresh in 60seconds passing the variable = 5

2'nd run, script offsets by 5 using the variable past and sends 5 more, headers refresh in 60 secs

etc...etc...

 

This is just some basic info that will hopefully get you started.

[Canman2005]

cool thanks