How to send hundreds of emails at a time

[fastsol]

I already have a method of sending hundreds of emails by creating a db que that a cron runs every so often.  My question is, is there a better way or a way at all to run a php script just once and be able to send hundreds of emails?  I run my site on a dedicated server, so I have complete control of it.  I would imagine that php would timeout when trying to send that much info. 

 

I would be sending a mixture of some emails over smtp and some straight from my server depending on the domain the email is going to. Basically anything going to a microsoft address flows through a gmail smtp to ensure it delivers to an inbox and not a spambox, everything else goes out of my mail host on my server.

 

I use phpmailer for all email sending.  Since all these emails are being sent based on certain db conditions in table data, I am making a que table that a cron runs to gather the according IDs and saves those.  Then another script/cron runs that actually sends the emails, which then marks the que table as sent as it goes for each ID.  I do it this way cause the que table could possibly gather more IDs in a run than the sending script is set to actually send.  So the sending cron runs X times more than the que cron.  Now maybe trying to send more emails in a single shot is pointless when I have all this cron doing it for me anyway, but I an tired of making 2 separate scripts, crons and tables to achieve a single goal for each automatic email I want to send.

 

Please don't suggest a email sending service as I have already looked at that option and at least as of today I have not found one that allows me to submit a chunk of data for them to send.  All places I talked to make you have a customer list, blah blah blah.  I only want to do this with my server, not a mail service.

 

Any suggestions? 

[jcbones]

You could write a bash script, and call it with cron.