quick question about alternates to mail()

[sfullman]

php runs on a single thred and I've recently encountered a case where mail() runs slow through no fault of mine (shared server).

Is there any way to write the mail to a file instead to where the mailer daemon will pick it up and send it out?

another way of saying this, I have my own linux server and I know mail stored under /var/spool/mail one file for each username, and that long file is all of the "in" messages i have. Is there any way to write "out" messages to a file which the daemon will then pick up 1,2, 5 minutes later?

Thanks, this might be a new project but may speed up some applications more.

Sincerely,
Samuel Fullman

[drew010]

not sure about putting it directly into a queue file for a specific mta but one thing you could try playing around with would be making a specific mail folder in your application and writing files to it which contain serialized data of email messages. set up a cron job to scan the folder every few minutes and if it sees any file, read the serialized data from it and then send the message.

for example a message may be stored in an array like so

$message = array();
$message['to'] = 'Recipient';
$message['subject'] = 'Subject here';
$message['body'] = 'Hello...';

so how i may go about it:
make a class to create and read emails
make a script to read a given folder and run on a schedule
if it sees a file, read its serialized contents
parse the contents with the class which sends the message
delete the file

alternatively you could make another php script which receives parameters and use the php execution functions to run the task in the background so that there would be no lag from sending the message.
maybe like

shell_exec('/usr/bin/php -f mail.php [e-mail] "subject here" "message" > /dev/null &');

not a lot of flexibility for sending mine messages like that but another thought, or pass it a filename that has the message body.