length of a string in php

Archbob

How long can a string be. I'm writing a newsletter script and instead of sending like 10,000 separate e-mails by looping through mysql_fetch_array, I want to sent one huge e-mail to alot of people so I want to store all their e-mail address in a string and then just send one huge e-mail. So how big can a string be?

laserlight

From the PHP manual:

Note: It is no problem for a string to become very large. There is no practical bound to the size of strings imposed by PHP, so there is no reason at all to worry about long strings.

Weedpacket

The question of whether your mailsever could handle such a whacking great long list of addresses (and whether the recipients' clients can as well) is, of course, another matter entirely...

Archbob

This will be release GPL of course, I have really not that much intention to use it myself....

Would it be better to send 1 huge mail or send thousands of separate mails to one address per mail?

Weedpacket

Better still is not to use mail() at all and talk protocol directly with the SMTP server (not that you said that you're not doing that already).

There are a bunch of SMTP classes around; the one that's part of PEAR is derived from an ancestor of the one at http://www.phpguru.org/

Archbob

I'm not familiar with this talking directly concept...

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Archbob
I'm not familiar with this talking directly concept...

It's lucky for you then that there are people who are, and have written PHP code to do it for you 🙂