mailing list question

[skdzines]

I have created a custom mailing list and want to know how to track which emails are sent and which ones bounce in my script, rather than just having to login to my webmail and look to see if any bounced. The ones that bounce, I want to be displayed to the screen so I may remove them from the database if they are no good. So basically, I want it to show how many emails were sent total, how many were successful and how many failed.

Does anyone know how to track this using PHP?

This is my code to send the emails to everyone in the list and track how many were sent:

if($_POST['subject'] && $_POST['message']){
	$sql = "SELECT *
        	FROM  subscribers"; 

$res = mysql_query($sql); 
$counter = 0;
while($sub = mysql_fetch_array($res)) {

$useremail=$sub['email_addr']; 
$subject="$subject";
$header = "From: [email][e-mail][/email]\r\n";
$header .= "X=Mailer: PHP/"; 
$body="
Hello ".$sub['name'].",

$message

[url]www.round-tree.com[/url]

To be removed from this list, please visit [url]www.round-tree.com/unsubscribe.php[/url]"; 
mail ($useremail, $subject, $body, $header);

$counter++;

}
$success = true;
$subject = "";
$message = "";

  }
}

Also, does anyone know of some code to validate email addresses that works well? I want to add some to my script to make sure somebody doesn't just type anything. Right now it only checks to make sure the field isn't empty.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[drew010]

for checking a valid input on the form, you can use this:
function isValid($email)
{
return eregi("^{[a-z0-9.-]+@+[a-z0-9.-]+.+[a-z]{2,4}$",} $email);
}

if you want to see which emails arent accepted, you will have to use sockets to send mail instead of using the mail() function.

you should probably write a class to do it. basically you will have to extract the user's domain from the email address, determine the mx servers using getmxrr and connect to them and attempt to send a message and see what the status code is. if its not a 2xx code you will know the message wasnt accepted and queue the address for deletion.

[skdzines]

Thank you drew010.

I'm not real sure what else I need to do to get the result back if it is a valid email address though.

I tried doing this and it didn't work:

if($_POST['name'] && $_POST['email_addr']){ 
	isValid($email_addr); //call to function
	if(!eregi){
		$error .= "The email address provided is not valid.";
	}else{
  $query = mysql_query("SELECT email_addr FROM subscribers WHERE email_addr='".addslashes(trim($email_addr))."'");
  $subscribe = mysql_fetch_row($query);
	$success = false; 
	if($subscribe[0] == $email_addr){
		$error .= "The email address <b>$email_addr</b> is already a subscribed member.<br>\n";
		}else{
		$insert="INSERT INTO `subscribers` ( `name` , `email_addr` ) 
		VALUES ('$name', '$email_addr');" or die ('Could not insert into database because: ' . mysql_error());
		$result=mysql_query($insert);
			$success = true;

more code............
}

I basically just copied and pasted the function you gave me into functions.php and did an include() in my mailingList.php page. I didn't change anything in the function except the var $email to $email_addr.

I'm not real sure on what to do to get the value back from the function to tell wether it is valid or not.

Can you help?

Thanks

[tude-marie]

The function he postet will return nothing if the email is invalid, which is the same as false. If an email is returned this will be interprited by PHP as true.

Meaning put the function call into a if-sentence.

[drew010]

it will just return true or false so call it in an if statement like this:

if (isValid($email_addr)) {
echo "Email is good!";
} else {
echo "Invalid Email";
}