sending more than 1000 emails with mail()

dodo

I'd like to know if there's a way to send a lot (more than 1000 emails) for mailing list with mail() or anthor function FAST.. a forloop for the mail function is just way too slow and sometimes you meet operation timeout. I don't know if there's an article about this or not. Please let me know if you know one. Otherwise i'd like to see one written. Thanks!

cgraz

Just send the results a few at a time dynamically.

Cgraz

dodo

i'm sorry, can you give an example in code?

cgraz

Well I don't know exactly what code you're working with, but use a for loop, grab the first 500 (or whatever) results, use a foreach loop to mail to those first 500. Then continue this until you've emailed everyone in the mailing list.

Cgraz

dodo

how's that different from just mail the 1000 in the same for loop? won't it take just as long?!

JakesSA

Im crecently worked on a same sort of problem. What I did, is broke them into categories...40 to be excate. I then use a for loop and the mail() function to send it out...via the categories rather that the intire bulk

notionlogic

The problem here is the browser (or server connection) timing out...

I'm currently completing work on a Mailing List management system and I got around this by having a running report of progress. The point being that by echoing out to the browser after every send (or batch of sends), the connection is kept alive!

Angus

You can of course increase the script timeout using php - but I would recommend having a play with flush() as well - which will allow you perhaps to echo out something every time the loop is passed...

eg echo"500 sent";

dodo

why is the mail() function so freaking SLOW? or am i doing it wrong? i commented out the mail part, it does it in lighting speed.. once the mail is in, it crawls like a snail??!

jerdo

The speed is going to depend on a few factors, some of which are the number of emails, the email server being used (local or non-local and the speed of each), the size of the emails being sent out. If you are sending out huge emails to a remote email server this could all take time to send the data to the server, get a response then move to the next message. And you are sending out 1000 emails that is going to take time no matter what.

dodo

i suppose. but are there any tricks to increase the speed?
so far i used javascript redirection to go around the time out business.

i'm testing right now to send 1000 emails grabbed from the database. the email's content is less than 5kb. i'm sending 50 at a time. it takes about 9 whole minutes!!!

with the exact same code, only if i comment out the mail part, it takes like 2 seconds.

does this sound reasonable? i think i'm doing something wrong.

here's part of my code that does the sending

if($action == "send_more") {
	/********* then send *********/

$number_per_time = 50; // send at most this per line
if(!$start)
	$start = 0;


// getting the message being sent
$mysql_result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $log_tablename ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 0,1") or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($mysql_result))
{
	$subject=$row[subject];
	$message=$row[message];
}


$subject = stripslashes($subject);
$message = stripslashes($message);


$from = "From: Dodo <NO_REPLY@regretless.com>";


$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $tablename ORDER BY email LIMIT $start, $number_per_time") or die(mysql_error());
while($result = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {


	$to = $result[email];
	$hash = $result[hash];

	echo "in the loop start with $start the email is $to<br />";

	$mass_email_footer = "

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Feel free to unsubscribe yourself at <a href=\"http://regretless.com/scripts/\">here</a>
";

	$message2 = $message . $mass_email_footer;

	//echo "hello message 2!!!".$message2;

	mail($to, $subject, $message2, $from);
} // end of while


if($start <= $total_entries) {
	$next = $start + $number_per_time;
	flush();
	echo "<div class=\"just\">$next done</div><br />";

	echo "<script language=\"javascript\">
	<!-- 

	location.replace(\"$PHP_SELF?action=send_more&start=$next\");

	-->
	</script>";
} else {
	echo "<div class=\"rings\">Done</div>
<div class=\"just\">All sent.<br /><br /><a href=\"index.php\">Back Home</a></div>";
}
} // end of send more

Chimera

The best answer to your question about the mail function being slow is, don't use the mail function. There are a ton of open source SMTP classes out there that are much faster and more flexible than the PHP mail function. I do a 6000 email run every couple of weeks, and I ended up using an SMTP class that allowed me to do HTML and plaintext, and a bunch of other things easily. Sending large amounts of mail is slow, there's no way around that. We currently send 1 every 5 seconds to avoid putting a huge load on the mail server, so 6000 emails take around 8 hours.

mcrbids

Try this:
http://phpbuilder.com/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=35

It's stable (routinely used for tens of thousands of emails) and works well. (Oh, and eh, I've sorta been involved with writing it...)

Anyway, check it out - it can't hurt!

As far as the browser timing out issue, I set it to time out after 20 seconds, reset, and go again. I have the sending loop output the email addy being processed, then run flush() to make sure it gets to the browser.

To send 10,000 takes (on average) a few hours on a fast server.

zalath

On a humorous side note, I wrote a script for bulk mailing, and on the first attempt gave it some 6000+ addresses to send to. What happened was disastrous. I saw nothing in the first twenty minutes. Then I started receiving notes that the mails got sent several times. As it turns out, two things happened. One: the script never timed out (as the timeout is based on the processor time used, and alas, most of the time was spent sending the mail, which uses the mail server's time, not php's) two: Opera re-requested the page every five minutes since it received no reply, so the first 1500 got the mail - count it - FIVE times. You can imagine they weren't too happy 😉

My advice: split your record. Make your script dynamic so it only sends a max. of 500 to 1000 at a time.

Chimera

I actually flag each email address in the database during the send as soon as that address has been mailed, that way if I have to restart the script, the same person won't get the same email twice. Then I reset those flags before each bulk mailing.

zalath

Yeah, I figured that too 😃 but sadly a bit too late 😛

Biscuit

Originally posted by dodo
why is the mail() function so freaking SLOW? or am i doing it wrong? i commented out the mail part, it does it in lighting speed.. once the mail is in, it crawls like a snail??!

The mail function is slow when you send lots of email because it opens and closes a connection to your SMTP server every time it's called. This slows matters down dramatically.

"lit at matches dot com" (scroll down) has some comments on this on the PHP manual page:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php

dodo

thank you for the note.

mlasky

I used to just throw all the email addresses into a mail queue table. Then you can write a script in any language to be executed via the command line, web page, or whatever. If I remember correctly we had ours on a job to be executed every 5-10 minutes... sending any mail in the queue.

TheSpeedOfDark

I was having similar problems, and I just finished my mass mailer (Not spam, but for company newsletters..)

 Anyway, what I did was pretty much how some of the previous posts here stated..I grabbed 40 emails from the sql database, mailed them out, and then had the browser automatically refresh the webpage once they sent. (I used javascript for that. was 1 line..real easy)
 I then stored a file on the ftp (in a secure directory) that basically kept count where I last left off. Each time the page would reload, it would look at the value in the text file, and then call the

$MyArray = mysql_fetch_array($result);

the amount of times to "get the database back up to where it left off".

Interestingly enough, this script ran fairly well, had no lag or anything otherwise undesirable, and we used it to send our first batch of mail to 5,000 people.

The only problem, of course, is the time it took to do this.. If you have thousands upon thousands of mails, it's going to take a while to complete the operation. I created a little percentage bar, and had it update each refresh of the webpage.. Just let it run a few hours, overnight, whatever, and then you're good to go.