Mass Email?

[DragonFire-N[R]]

I was wondering what would be the best way to mass/bulk e-mail? I imagine something like this:

 

while ( $email = mysql_fetch_array( $emailquery ) )
{
    mail( $email['email'], $email['to'], $email['message'], 'From: user@aol.com' );
}

 

 

Wouldn't be the best method. Can someone provide a better method or perhaps a tutorial that introduces a more efficient method of mass/bulk emailing? I'd greatly appreciate it

[php_tom]

You mean like example 1 on this page?

http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/extending.html

 

[DragonFire-N[R]]

lol, yeah, something like that.

 

Is there not a more efficient method for sending many e-mails other than calling the mail() function every time it goes through a cycle?

[php_tom]

You might be able to send the email to yourself, then BCC a whole bunch of people on that email. That way the email server has to deal with sending the mail and you don't have to wait for each individual email to send. But I think some email servers have a max limit on the number of BCC you can do... maybe 100-ish? (not sure)

 

P.S. I hope you're not starting a spam server, LOL!

[DragonFire-N[R]]

lol, I'm not; I'm trying to create a newsletter but once so many people subscribe to it, it'll start stressing the server having to send all of those e-mails individually and I'm looking for a more efficient method

 

Thanks for the idea though, I may use that.

 

Would it be possible to send Bcc using the PHP mail() function?

[PC Nerd]

another thing you need to keep an eye on is your CPU usage ( if its a shared server).  If it is, then maybe you should look at only sending 50 emails etc at once, however havign a cron run the script once every 10 minutes over an hour period. If you do this, you woudl need to keep track of who has reeived the mail, so possibly add a field to the DB of "received" or something. 

 

Not sure if this is the best aproach, but it sounds good for mass mailing on a shared server.

 

Yours,

PC Nerd

[DragonFire-N[R]]

Thank you PC Nerd for your feedback. When you say "have a cron run the script once every 10 minutes," what exactly do you mean? Is it possible to configure the shared server to execute a PHP script regularly without requiring someone to access the file via HTTP?

 

I appreciate the info from everyone and I will be using all of the ideas

[php_tom]

link=topic=156720.msg681092#msg681092 date=1188081703]

Would it be possible to send Bcc using the PHP mail() function?

 

Yeah,

// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";

// Additional headers
$headers .= 'To: Mary <mary@example.com>, Kelly <kelly@example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: Birthday Reminder <birthday@example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: birthdayarchive@example.com' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Bcc: birthdaycheck@example.com' . "\r\n";

// Mail it
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

(That's taken from http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php. The BCC field can have multiple emails, they have to be comma delimited.)

 

Hope it helps.

[tibberous]

A cron job is where you have the cron daemon visit a page a regular intervals, normally for queue processing or cleanup or to attack your enemies.