mail sent reporting

dgburton

hi 🙂

I have a script that goes through a mysql db and sends an email to each recipient listed there. The script works just fine and everyone gets the correct email (there are about 100 people on the list).

However the script takes about a minute to load and send the emails, during this time the user has no visual confirmation of the emails being sent.

My question is, can anyone let me know of a way to report the success of each send as it happens, ie a bit of javascript or something that would say 'message 2 of 100 delivered' etc etc.

Thanks in advance,

dan

daveyboy

depends on your webserver / browser setup, so it's a bit crap, but you could just echo "Mail sent to blah@blah.com" in every loop. Some webservers cache all output first, though, and some browsers do the same, so it's not so reliable. A better idea may be to send the mails in batches of ten, display a status page, then redirect with a meta-redirect header after a few seconds to send the next 10.

dgburton

thanks for your reply 🙂

my server is caching the result before being sent, I'm playing around using frames and auto-refreshing the pages at the mo,

but you're right - it is a bit crap !!

cheers

dan

daveyboy

i don't think you'll find an ideal solution with PHP - a browser isn't the best interface to longer-running actions. have you looked for any SMTP classes or the like that could help you speed up the sending ( sending mails to the same domain all at once over the same connection, or maybe handing it all over to sendmail or some other background process ).

The problems will only get worse as the list gets longer, and you might even run up against the maximum script runtime limit. I think default is about 30 secs but my host only allows 2.

I'd be very interested to know how you solve the problem.

Dave

edspace

Search for a function flush() in the php manual. Someone had the same question in this forum so you might also want to search for that. From what i remember you can use flush to display the output even though the script is not finished running.

Some browsers (IE one of them) have a buffer so you might have to fill the buffer with empty lines "\n" (300 of them if i remember correctly) and once the buffer is filled it will display the output right on the page.

Also make sure you are not using GZIP for your pages because flush will not work with it.

I tried something with javascript and it didn't work.