PHP mail questions

[rempires]

Hi, i'm working on a script for a after-school project/competition, well actually a site, but one of the scripts has to send mass emails.  Looking at the mail option in php tells me that's not adequate to handle a few hundred email, so i looked up pear, but i'm slightly confused about it.  Also we can't use any scripts we didn't create and i don't know if pear would fall under this (although i guess i could argue if php doesn't fall under it then pear shouldn't either  ) Could somone please explain pear to me and maybe an example of how it works, as when looking on there website i got kinda confused, or if somone could give me a link they know to another pear tutorial that would be awesome.  Are there any other programs out there i could use instead of pear or any other way i could do it? 

 

a little background, all the email addresses are stored in a database, pulled out and then need to be sent, the ems sage is an HTML email message that just displays updates about the site, it gets sent to ALL registered suers (that's the site requirements not mine, personally i like giving users options...)

 

by the way, i'm not breaking the rules asking for help, it's a project were we are given about 3months (about 18days left) were your encouraged to learn on your own by finding help, they just don't want others to do the entire website for you, so they banned scripts that aren't yours.

 

thank,s

jhon

[interpim]

why not use a foreach statement to cycle through your email addresses sending the email to each of the addresses in your database?

[rempires]

because the mail function in php opens and closes the socket each time it sends a piece of mail apparently, which is really inefficient. so php recommends pear for sending mass email...