Mass Mailouts using PHP

Collis_Taeed

Hello, I've just built an application to send a mailout for our clients to email their mailing lists. They're all legitmate companies sending mostly e-newsletters to their customers, so hopefully I haven't helped contribute to the spam problem!!

But anyways so I've built the system which just basically takes a csv list of email addresses and then loops through and emails each one.

I was wondering if anyone knows of any potential hazards when mailing a LOT of people? I don't really know how many people these guys would have on their mailing lists but I'd like to cater to all situations.

I've just sent 2500 mails to myself (yay!) and the script appeared to run fine, but the mails are arriving in a very staggered fashion... is this something to do with the mailserver itself?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!!

ZibingsCoder

Chances are that has a lot to do with the mailservers. I can remember one of the first scripts I ever wrote I got to send me 100,000 emails with subject "test" and body "test"...and it took approximately 4 weeks for them to all arrive. I wouldn't worry about it too much though as long as you're not sending the same email to one person a ton of times. It should be fine otherwise...at least it has been in my experience.

Collis_Taeed

Yep, it took me about an hour but they all arrived, just kinda staggered. I guess after PHP dispatches them the mailserver just queues them up and slowly chugs along. Interestingly it didn't seem to slow down other mail operations on the same server, so I guess it must have a clever queuing algorithm...

Anyhow I think I might limit the script to processing 1000 p/hour or something. Less spamming anyhow... :-)

ZibingsCoder

Sounds like a plan. If we're all done, don't forget to mark it resolved 😉

Drakla

Somebody is using a script of mine that emails out a fairly large email, each one having slight changes per email and it takes about 45 minutes to email out 12 thousand. I noticed when there wasn't much in the emails it was doing the same thing in 14 minutes, so the message body size is a factor.

I also ran checks with the subject being the number of the message and sending 100s to myself and the same thing happens - they mostly come back in order, by sometimes a wounded soldier will limp back home 2 days later.

sid

i just wrote one for my own site which sends out about 5000 mails. how i do it is that when i "send" the newsletter, it stores a new entry in a mysql table. then i have a cron script running every 30 minutes, which checks for entries in that table. if there is one, it will send out the newsletter and then delete the row from mysql - otherwise it does nothing. for 5000 emails it just takes maybe 10 minutes to get them all sent out - i used a nrowser based method before: it works much better now.

vikette

Might want to check with your ISP provider and let them know that the mailings are legit. You don't want him to block you. He might also have some suggestions on getting your mailings out efficiently (e.g. send mass mailings between 2 - 7 a.m.)

sid

he knows. i'm with a rather small provider (12 servers, 300 domains) and have been for 2 years. he is very reliable and fast with getting stuff fixed - as long as i keep him updated what i am up to mailinglist-wise he is cool with it. but thanks for your concern ;-)