Email, more efficient than mail()

[lozzaloz]

Is there a way to send hundreds or thousands of emails at a time using SMTP or sockets? I run a Student Union mailing list, using a PHP web application, and need to send up to a couple of thousand emails at a time. Currently I retrieve the email addresses from a database, then loop through them and use the mail() function for each recipient. This is very inefficient, and it sometimes takes minutes to run the script.

Is it possible to use PHP to open a connection to the mail server, send all the emails, then close the connection?

[Weedpacket]

There are a number of PHP classes for direct SMTP control. One that distributes with PHP is in the PEAR repository; there's also this one, and others that can be found by searching Google for PHP SMTP class.