how to send mail from mysql table

[Anon]

I'm basically sending many emails using a while loop and accessing the name and email addresses from a mysql database.

I sent about 800 messages. It took about 5-10 minutes to complete and got maybe up to 100 errors over the course of the day.

I am sure some of the email addresses were no good but some were mail queue problems.

I'm just wondering if I could have done it a better way as this is something I will have to do again.

Here's my code:

$q="select name, email from email_table";
$r=mysql_query($q);

while ($a=mysql_fetch_array($r)) {
$to="$a[email]";
$subject="Email Subject";
$from="From: <[e-mail]>";
$message="fairly long text message";
mail($to, $subject, $message, $from);
}

[Anon]

You're sending the same message to all adresses? How about sending just one mail, but with multiple recipients? Just separate the adresses with ", ".

To use blind carbon copy see http://www.phpbuilder.com/forum/read.php3?num=2&id=107904&thread=104213

[Anon]

Well I also wanted to put the name of the recipient in the actual message so it said something like this:

"Dear John Smith,"
as in "Dear $a[fname] $a[lname], "

I suppose if it would process better than I can make it a general Dear sir/madam kind of thing.

I don't know how I could do the BCC in a while loop but it would probably be too messy to do this:

while (($a=mysql_fetch_array($r)) {
$to.=$a[email].", ";
}