Newsletter using loops - help

[Morrigan]

Hi there, new to the board 🙂

got a few questions for the PHP gurus here. I'm building a newsletter system with an admin control panel where they can manage the subscribers, send the newsletter (duh) to all on the list, etc.
The thing is, I need the emails to be somewhat personalised... For example, the email body would be like
"Dear $name,

Here are the latest news..."
And with the unsuscribe link in the footer, like
"http://domain.com/unsubscribe.php?id=$id"

The biggest problem is that the newsletter is intended for a large number of emails. Looping the mail() function hundreds or thousands of time is obviously not a very good idea. It wouldn't be a problem if I could just use the Bcc header with a list of all the subscribers, but since not every email is exactly the same, I can't use that. 🙁 But I don't think looping is a good idea either. Any idea of the success rate for X numbers of emails, or benchmarks on the time it would take?

What should I do? Suggestions please! Thanks. 🙂

[stolzyboy]

you could try looping through say 50 at a time, and using the sleep command for however long, then loop the next 50 and so on...

haven't tried it, but i remember someone else on this board wanting to do the same thing, may search for it

[Morrigan]

Hmm, maybe... I wonder though, would it affect the performance of the webserver if they are sending so many emails? Wouldn't it congest the server somewhat? 🙁

[stolzyboy]

yes it probably would especially if the emails are large in size