Sending mass quantities of emails

[kensai]

I need to send emails to our users. The problem is, there are about 40.000 of them. I'm aware of the mailing list scripts out there but I'd like to develop one of my tastes. As far as I know I can use:

1. crontab

2. sending part of the list at a time.

Are there any other ways to sending so many of emails?

[drawmack]

first of all crontab will schedule the program to run on a specfic date/time schedule.

So your real question is when I have to send a bunch of emails I can do it on a schedule or part of them at a time, is there any other way.

Well you could do it all at once upon user request through a web page, you could do it on a schedule and still part of them at a time.

Here is what I would do.

Have the program send one email from the administrator to the administrator and BCC everyone else.

[superwormy]

As a note, I've heard the mail() function isn't good for sending mass emails, because it opens and closes a socket on each call to mail().

A better option would be to look at the imap functions and send mail through that.