Sending automated emails to large numbers of recipients

bunner_bob

I'm working on a site in which the client wants users to be able to sign up to receive notifications whenever new offers are posted. The site is served by a custom PHP/MySQL CMS, so I can build whatever needs building.

My concern is, if the site is adding, say, 10 new offers a day, and we end up with 10,000 subscribers, we're sending out 100,000 emails a day. The site's ISP (Pair Networks) may not be too happy about us using PHP mail to do that. Am going to check with them but meanwhile...is there a better way? Perhaps an outside service? How do people handle this sort of thing?

dagon

quite a few hosts have mail limits, if i was sending that much email i would get a dedicated server. And i hope you where not hinging of using php's mail() function. Look into something like phpmailer. of course you could use an outside source for sending your email.

bunner_bob

We are on a quasi-dedicated server - one of Pair's Virtual Private Servers.

Yes I was going to use mail(), not knowing of another way. Doesn't phpmailer use php's mail() function to send?

Regarding using an outside source - can you give me an example?

dagon

mail()

Note: It is worth noting that the mail() function is not suitable for larger volumes of email in a loop. This function opens and closes an SMTP socket for each email, which is not very efficient.

bradgrafelman

bunner bob wrote:
Doesn't phpmailer use php's mail() function to send?

Absolutely not. None of the popular mailing classes (Pear::Mail, PHPMailer, XPertMailer, etc.) are simple wrappers for PHP's internal mail() function, which is severely lacking in just about every area you can think of - features, performance (as dagon points out above), etc.