question about writing to the /var/mail file

[sfullman]

Hi There,

I asked this question before and got no real good answer, here's another try.

the mail() function in php is slow. I'm interested in doing it a different way, here's an idea, please reply.

I know that received mail is stored in a file by the user name in /var/mail, e.g. var/mail/root, and is stored in plaintext. OK, where is outgoing mail stored? Or is it "stored" anywhere at all? If it is stored somewhere before the mailer daemon gets it, if I could lock this file, append (very carefully :-) a plain text email string, and unlock it, would this send out mail faster?

Or if I could write the whole thing to a file and then have a single command to have sendmail parse it..

If anyone else has solved this problem, kindly let me know. I'm fully aware there might be some programming hurdles to overcome.

Sam Fullman

[drew010]

if the mail function is so slow you can just pass the message straight instead of having php pipe it. usually unless mail gets put in queue or if outgoing mail is logged it isnt saved. there probably wont be much speed gain but if you want to pipe directly to sendmail you can like this.

$smpath = "/usr/sbin/sendmail";

$from = "[e-mail]";
$to = "[e-mail]";
$subject = "this is a subject";
$message = "the whole nice message right here";

$sm = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -f $from";

$p = popen($sm,"w");
fputs($p, "To: $to\n");
fputs($p, "From: $from\n");
fputs($p, "Subject: $subject\n");
fputs($p, $myheaders."\n\n");
fputs($p, $message."\n");
fputs($p, ".\n");
pclose($p);

[sfullman]

Thank you VERY MUCH for your suggestion, and I need to learn more about sendmail, not php I guess.

the idea you had didn't work ANY better, basically it sends out about one email every half second. I'm trying to get a rate at least 20 - 30 times that to be usable. I tested it this way:

for($i=1;$i<=200;$i++){
	echo 'sending '.$i."<br>";
	$p = popen($sm,"w"); 
	fputs($p, "To: $to\n"); 
	fputs($p, "From: $from\n"); 
	fputs($p, "Subject: $subject $i\n"); 
	fputs($p, $myheaders."\n\n"); 
	fputs($p, $message."\n"); 
	fputs($p, ".\n"); 
	pclose($p);
}

Anyway, is it possible to write the ENTIRE set of emails to a single file, and then have perhaps a cron job to grab the contents and send them out as mail at regular intervals? Mail is an important feature, and I'm sure someone has figured out how to pump out more than a few emails every second.

Best,
Sam Fullman

[drew010]

i think if you want to get greater speed in sending mails, you should look at perl. perl has some support for multithreading so you could open a bunch of simutaneous threads to send messages. there is a perl program that has been out a little while for bulk mailing. i have only used it once but i remember it had a rate of about 300 messages every second or so (also depends on server speed and connection). depending on how many messages and how many people you are sending to you may be interested in it. if so let me know and i can give you the developer's contact info.
as far as writing all the messages to a file, im not sure on that. you might be able to stick a bunch of messages in the mail queue but im not sure that would make it much faster. a few weeks ago i wrote a php cli bulk mailer, but still the speed wasn't great. i think it mailed about 5-7 messages per second on a p4 1.8ghz 512 ram (although there are a few extra options i had running that could have [and probably did] reduce the time it took to generate a message).
so anyway, if you are looking for 20-30 a second look perl for now.