Sending Email In PHP Using TO or BCC

irasmith

I've got a question that I am not sure where to turn to for explanation, so I thought I'd post in this forum since it seems to be the most logical place.

I have a question regarding sending email with PHP. Actually, I've been working on resolving some bugs in an email newsletter module someone else wrote for the Post Nuke CMS system. The original developer has had other major items to work on and so I have just been volunteering my time and efforts at helping users out on the support forum on his site.

If you use BCC in an email in PHP, and you have a list of users to send the email to, will the system be able to process this BCC send request faster than if you were using PHP to send the email with the TO line?

I'm asking this because one user has a rather large list of users on their site and the email newsletter application doesn't send out the email to the large list. The user has a smaller group for another newsletter and it goes out. I have a small list myself from my site that I send message out to, so I know it works. It just seems that maybe the time it takes the PHP script to process the request for the large list times out and therefore it just doesn't get sent.

Hopefully, someone here can answer what I've asked above, and any information would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Ira

g00bster

I don't think the execution time for a long list of emails would be a problem for PHP, but you can try changing the max_execution_time in php.ini. Otherwise I would say that it makes no difference whether sending it to someone as BCC rather than TO. Try switching them and see if it works. Cheers.

superwormy

I can't answer your question BUT I've heard that for sending large amounts of email, the mail() function is not a good idea.

Reason being, mail() creates a socket, sends the mail, and closes the socket on every call to mail().

A better solution is to use the SMTP functions to open one socket, send all the mails, and close the socket.

Sorry I can't answer your question, but thought that might help.

irasmith

Actually your replies have helped me as I was searching for some type of understanding of it all and your responses have cued me in. So for that I really do thank both of you.

I am not the original developer of the particular module that the user is asking me questions about. I am just a programmer who happened to be in the right place at the right time to lend a hand to the developer. So I was just programming away taking care of issues as they arose.

Thanks and I'll use the information given here to consider what things I might ask the user to try next.
Ira