email list manager

sneakyimp

I have a site with about 20,000 registered users. We want to send them a newsletter.

It seems sheer folly to me to just put a loop around a mail() function. We also might bog the machine down if we were to simply loop using phpMailer() or PEAR mail.

I'd also like to set it up so that people can manage their mail preferences, etc. in case they get tired of the newsletter.

I've seen complex mailing list managers like phplist but it seems to me that is a bit overkill and integrating that software with my existing site seems like a lot of work...i'd have to alter either phplist's user management to alter my existing site's user records or somehow move my user information into phplist.

Can anyone recommend any existing PHP mail management package that might be suitable for me?

iNFERiON

Why use a management package ? If you know a bit of PHP you can easily manage this yourself. What you should be doing.

Alter the member profile page so they can set Newsletter ON or OFF, save this preference in a new database field in the user table (e.g. newsletter=1)
To send the newsletter, you could indeed use a loop as you already said. You could do something like this:

// Define mysql info here
$fetch_users = mysql_query("SELECT emailaddress FROM `users` WHERE newsletter=1");
$users = mysql_fetch_array($fetch_users);
foreach ($users as $emailaddress) {
  // Mail function here
  $to = $emailaddress;
  // Additionaly, you could add a small sleep time at the end of the mailing, to prevent the server from going down because of the large mailing
  sleep(2);
}

It can be as simple as that, hope that helps you a bit.

sneakyimp

thanks for your suggestion.

mail list management packages like phplist have all sorts of useful stuff...like automatically unsubscribing users who bounce some number of emails--where you can configure the unsubscribe threshold.

they also have a lot of header creation type code to help you keep your newsletter from getting bounced altogether.

and they allow you to send mail through a separate machine should you need to scale your website up to several machines.