sending email list in batchs?

KashKurcura

Hello:

I'm in the process of making a script that will send out emails that are stored in mysql. As it is right now the program loops threw each email and sening out the email. What I was wanting to know is how can I send out batchs of 100 emails at one time and making the script sleep between each batch.

Anyone have any ideas on how this is done?

Thanks!

spirp

Is it the same mail that's going to be sent to all addresses, or is it a different mail for each?

If it's the same, there a very simple way to do it. Take 100 addresses, create a comma delimited list, add it to the BCC-field of the header, and send it. Of course you need a valid address in the TO-field as well, but I'd suggest not using one of your customers addresses, but the same you sent them from.

If it's supposed to send different mails to different addresses, just get 100 addresses, send their mails and pause.

// Olle

KashKurcura

it is the same email that goes to each member and using bcc is NOT an option becuase i do not want my members to contact each other.

jblack

BCC is what you want to do if you want to send the same email to several different people, without every knowing who it was sent to. BCC stand for Blind Carbon Copy. If you put the TO: address as the same as the FROM address, the only thing they will see is the TO and FROM address. They will never see a BCC field.

spirp

My point exactly 🙂 And best of all is that mailservers don't die of the load, as the originating mailserver only receives one mail, not 100.. 🙂

KashKurcura

That is not what I'm after at all. I have over 7 thousand members on my list and that is not a very good solution. Thank you for your input but I will find the solutions elsewhere.

Does anyone else know have any solution on how I would send out batches of 100 emails while a short delay between batches?

spirp

You could always create an array containing all the data that is unique for each mail, and then loop through it:

$mail[0]['to'] = "foo@bar.com";
$mail[0]['header'] = "Hi Foo!";
$mail[1]['to'] = "bar@bar.com";
$mail[1]['header'] = "Hi Bar!";
...
$mail[99]['to'] = "bar@foo.com";
$mail[99]['header'] = "Hi Bar!";

foreach ($mail as $m) {
    niftyMailSenderFunction($m['to'], $m['header']);
}

Then create a small pause (using timestamps and for-loops I guess), then parse new data, send it, pause, parse, send, and continue like that into eternity 🙂

Using standard mailservers (such as sendmail or qmail) there is no way to create 100 mails, then sending them all at once, at least not that I've hear of. To do this your only option is to use CC or BCC, but as you said that is not an option (btw, I'm curios, why isn't that an option? 🙂 ).

If and when you find a sollution, let me know 🙂 It's always good to know a different sollution to a problem. And, sorry I couldn't help more..

Good luck,

Olle

philosophia

i'm doing the same thing, except i'm still looping through a table of email addys in my database and sending ea mail out individually

i wanted to send them out as cc's or bcc's but the client didn't want to do that because certain spam filtering programs automatically filter out emails with large number of names in their cc or bcc's because most spams are sent this way

i still haven't run into a situation where the client will want to send out hundreds of emails at a time, i don't know what that's going to do with sendmail on the webserver this app is hosted on. it's a rather powerful machine, and i asked whether sendmail could handle this type of load in #sendmail on irc, a few responded and said it could. does anyone have any insight into this particular situation?

spirp

With all the different parameters, it's hard to predict load levels. Depending on mail-size, number of mails, number of webservers running on the same machine (if any), number of other customers using the same server, what the other customers do, and so on..

Generally 100 mails in bulk isn't a problem, as long as the mail doesn't have attachments and such. You could probably send twice as much, maybe even ten times as much, but as I said earlier, mail-server tend to choke, and that could slow down the performance of your webapp. A good thing to have in mind, is as KashKurcura said, having a pause between the 100 mails, to allow the server to cool off a bit, and start sending out the mails.

Spam-filters shouldn't really be able to filter out a BCC-mail, because it should be impossible to tell that you've been BCC'd except for the fact that the TO-address doesn't match your own. Filterin out this way is, according to me, a bad idea since it has many false positives and many false negatives. A better way is to get rid of spam the right way, through laws and intelligent users (unforunately, that second statement will never prove true.. 🙂 )

Well, enough ranting and raving for now.. 🙂

// Olle

wmac

Just wanted to comment that some mailservers will reject your email if you append more than for example 5 addresses in bcc section.

Mac