Faster mail

[trex005]

I have a list of about 100,000 people that I send mail to about once a week... my problem is it also takes almost that entire week to send the mail out. what I am doing currently is looping the mail() command but Each e-mail has that persons stats in it so I have to include the assigning a variable to be put into the E-mail also in each loop. then when I try to send I have to track who it has sent to allready because it allways times out in a couple of hours sending and I have to restart it... There are hundreds of companies out there that send customized E-mails (like with each users name) and they seem to be able to do it in a matter of seconds... how can I make this more efficiant? I know there's a way

[[deleted]]

Companies use mailinglist software, not a free web scripting language.

Instead of mail(), try using sendmail directly.
Try launching several of your mailing scripts at once,
and let them each do a part of your list.

[Anon]

I had that same problem, but on a somewhat smaller scale. Below are some ideas to speed up sending mail, some more effective than the other. Find out what the bottleneck is in your setup and choose the best.

1) Install a faster mailserver, like qmail or postfix. Sendmail is a magnitude slower in delivering and sending mail.
2) Don't use the PHP mail() but talk to the SMTP-server directly. I use the HTML Email Class from Heyes Computing (http://www.heyes-computing.net/) to do this. This package also enables you to send MIME-mail easily, examples are included.
3) Use several outgoing SMTP-servers. You can modify your script to do a round-robin on two or more servers. Using other servers makes it possible for the MTA's to keep up with PHP stuffing the mail queue.
4) Enlarge the PHP memory limit. Can speed up PHP.
5) Enough RAM. Make sure Linux doesn't have to swap to your HD when handling a lot of write actions to the mail queue.
6) Choose a fast filesystem on your queue disk, like ReiserFS, JFS or XFS (software), and/or use RAID striping on SCSI-disks (hardware).
7) Make sure your OS can generate a lot of parallel TCP-connections. The xBSD's tend to be faster than Linux.
8) Enlarge bandwidth to the outside. No matter how fast your server(s), if there's no way to send all that mail your stuck.

Hope this helps,

Jasper Veltman
Webminds IT