Will pay someone for their help!

[Anon]

Hi there,

I have designed a site that people place posts on and it gets sent to everyone on the list. It uses a foreach loop through the list of members in the forum, and executes the mail() command to send out the emails.

The obvious drawback is that this takes almost a second per email to compile an html email and send it out to everyone on the list, and the user of the script isn't going to sit around for two minutes.

There are two options, one which I have tried with no success and the other which I don't know how to do. First option I tried is the BCC method, but I cannot get it to work.

Second option is to send the results to a background operation which is programmed to execute every 10 minutes or so, but I have never done scripts that run on the server automatically.

Please let me know what you would charge for technical support that would stay with me to completion. I'm a competent programmer and will make this as easy on you as possible.

Sincerely,
Sam Fullman
[e-mail]
Compass POint Media

[Anon]

Either figure out the bcc or set up some kind of list-serve. send one email to [e-mail] and it goes to all the people on the list.

For bcc I remember seeing someone else having the smae problem, search the forum.

[crusty_php]

You can pay me if you like, or simply integrate this:

$people_count=mysql_num_rows($result);

while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$recipients[] = $row[email];
}
$recipient_list = implode(",",$recipients);

//do mail
mail ("recipient list","Message from me",
"$body"
,"Bcc: $recipient_list\r\nFrom: me");

echo "have sent ".$people_count." emails";

[Anon]

Here's my solution:

Caller page:
<?php

I call the page with lynx and put in the background

$devnull= lynx -dump 'http://www.your.host.com/page.php?send=all' &;
?>
You can of course access the page with a browser directly.

BCC-mail script:
(assumes a db with mail content, maildb, and a db with recipents, mailuserdb.)
page.php:
<?php
$email = array();
$tmp = array();
$number_of_bcc = 95;
define("MAILPROGRAM","/usr/sbin/sendmail -t");
$machine_adress = 'ipnumber';
$errloc = '/'; # error location is root url
$admin = array('[e-mail]');
$ghost_recipent = '';
$from_addr = '$addr';
$datum=date("ymd H:i:s",time());
$mail_footer = "";

for db conn

include ("includes/mysql_conn.inc");

get message

it don't have to be in a db...

$sql = "SELECT * FROM maildb";
$res=mysql_query($sql);
$row=mysql_fetch_array($res);
$subject=$row['subject'];
$body=$row['body'];
$body.=$mail_footer;
unset($sql);
unset($row);
unset($res);

switch($send){
case 'all':
$sql = "SELECT * FROM mailuserdb WHERE email != ''";
$res=mysql_query($sql);
while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($res)){
$email[]=$row['email'];
}

loop through email in steps of number_of_bcc

put each chunk of recipents

in bcc-field and mail

$n=0; # bcc tmp counter
$m=1; # mailcounter
while ($m<=count($email)){
$index=$m-1;

save up to number_of_bcc in tmp array

$tmp[]=$email[$index];
$n++;

test if we reached max number of bcc

or if current mail is the last

if ($n==$number_of_bcc ||
$m==( count($email) ) ){
send_bcc_mail($tmp,$subject,$body);
$n=0;
unset($tmp);
$tmp=array();
}
$m++;
}

done

break;
} # end switch

function send_bcc_mail($email,$subject,$body){
global $from_addr,$ghost_recipent;
$recipents=implode(",",$email);
$mp = popen(MAILPROGRAM, "w")
or print("Can't open sendmail");
fputs($mp, "Mime-Version: 1.0\n")
or print "Can't write to sendmail";
fputs($mp, "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\n");
fputs($mp, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n");
fputs($mp, "To: $ghost_recipent\n");
fputs($mp, "From: $from_addr\n");
fputs($mp, "Bcc: $recipents\n");
fputs($mp, "Subject: $subject\n");
fputs($mp, $body . "\n");

pclose($mp)
and print "Can't close sendmail";
}
?>

HTH

Christian Albinsson
Korridor AB
[e-mail]

[Anon]

That was me, I couldn't get it to work for anything I tried.

I know when to ask for help and this is one I think I need help on, but it may involve server issues. Which is why I said I'd be willing to pay someone for their assistance.

Sam

[Anon]

OK, I'll try that, let you know if it works on this string. :-) I just remember working with the BCC: header and never having success with it but I'll try your code.

Sam

[Anon]

That's two good ideas! Thank you. I have never yet called an application int eh background and it's one of my holy grails of advanced skills to learn, so I will try this.

Sam

[khaine]

You could always try using a cron job in conjuction with curl. Just write a script that does what you want it to then set up a cron job to run a curl command that executes the script. That sounds confusing doesnt it. o.k try this write a page that will send the emails and call it sendemails.php then create a cron job which calls curl. ( Curl is a command line url program you can get it at http://curl.haxx.se/ ) then set the cron job to execute every ten minutes. ok not quite a PHP solution but it works.

Mark.