How to send email to 100,000+ personalized emails

Anon

Hi
My company has a very large database of 100,000+ members with first and last names. I need to send an email to these users each day customized with their names in the subject header.

Is there any way this can be done via PHP? Would script timeout errors get me? ($30,000 Lyris software is out of the question at this point).

Or, if you suggest running this in the background instead as a web page script, how do you do it?

Anyone have ideas?

Tennisguy

Anon

I have recently written a script that does exactly what you suggest but using a much smaller database of names (approx 3000). It takes the email address and names from a MySql table.

It is very effective but does take upwards of an hour to send this many mails, so your list might be a bit too much for it. If you are interested I can mail you the script.

Will Prescott

Anon

This is so dependent on the local environment. A good bit of
the processing time on this is going to be DNS lookups, so it
helps to have a DNS on the same ethernet as your SMTP server...

The point being, that fact that your system processes 3k emails/hour
is no guarantee that his system might not be 3x or 1/3 x as fast.

Anon

Hi Will,

I am going to be in need of something like that very soon here. I was going to write it, but if you don't mind, I'd love to see what you've come up with, that is of course, if you don't mind.

Thanx,
Terrence

Anon

Hey Kirk,

I agree with you 100% Perhaps this is one of those things that many of us as web developers need to remeber. Everything we do imposes a load of some sort on the machine.

That said, do you agree that this is best accomplished as a cron job? To take it further, instead of just blasting the server with the entire load at one shot, break it up into sections that are done in timed intervals, say every three hours or something. As I said to Will, I am in need of something similar, but I no better than to hit the server like that, especially on a virtual server account.

What do you think?

Later on,
Terrence

Anon

What you need is an asynchronous method of sending the emails. I was also posed with this same situation recently and opted to use a Win2000 box with MS SMTP Server installed. MS SMTP Server has a directory under MailRoot called "PickUp". You can write any well formed email message into it and it will pick it up ASAP. For PHP to write upwards of 50,000 files into the directory only took about 10 minutes... after that the SMTP server did the crunching for sending the emails.

If you are on a Linux/Unix box, there are lots of SMTP servers out there, I'm sure plenty have this "PickUp" directory functionality.

G'Luck,
Jack