[RESOLVED] Your thoughts on PEAR::Mail_Queue (and some questions)

TheoGB

I tried to use this to make a mailing list because, as the PHP manual suggests, the mail() function isn't a good idea to be called over and over for mailing lists.

However, the nature of the example of how to use it led me to investigate the PHP of how it was working. This is because the example they have queues up whole emails in a database, which isn't very good for a mailing list, since why duplicate a text block of the whole email body over and over when you actually only need to generate it once?

Anyway, reading through it seems like at the bottom of all the (complex) calls being made there's a simple call to mail() in any case. So what gives? What am I missing?

There's a secondary question here where the PHP syntax was over my head.
Why would you instantiate a class like this:

$mail_queue =& new Mail_Queue($db_options, $mail_options);

What does =& mean?

Thanks in advance

johanafm

Secondary question:
It's two seprate operators, so rather = and &, than =&.

= is your plain old assignment operator.

& is the reference operator, which passes a reference to the variable, rather than the value of the variable.

While this used to be valid code, it ought to generate an error in PHP 5.

$instance =& new Someclass

# both these variables will reference the same instance
$instance = new SomeClass;
$sameInstance = $instance;	# assign the reference

# which, for basic types corresponds to
$i = 2;
$j = &$i;					# assign the reference


# Here you have two separate instances
$instance = new SomeClass;
$newInstance = clone $instance;	

# which corresponds to
$i = 2;
$j = $i;

I havn't looked at Mail_queue, but if it uses the regular mail() function to send emails, it's probably because it wasn't intended to send one email to several recipients, but rather just send several different emails each to one recipient only. Or, there might be a config option to use something other than mail().

You could have a look at PEAR::mail to send single emails to multiple recipients, which seem to match what you are after.
And if you want to create a mail queue, you should indeed remove the recipient from the db table and keep recipients in a separate table with a foreign key to the emails.

TheoGB

Yeah, I was wondering if it was using passing by reference but I wasn't sure how that could work. Cheers for that.

As to the Mail_Queue, the mail() function says this in the manual:

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.
For the sending of large amounts of email, see the » PEAR::Mail, and » PEAR::Mail_Queue packages.

I mean the point is that it's trivial for someone to write up my email newsletter so that it's called in batches of 50 via a cron.job. But the implication there is that PEAR's functionality is better. I just couldn't see how it was.

NogDog

I have not used PEAR::Mail_Queue, do don't know the specifics, but supposedly it uses PEAR::Mail to do the mailing, and PEAR::Mail has a factory which allows you to select between PHP's mail() function or sendmail or SMTP to send the email; and it appears that the Mail_Queue constructor provides the means to specify which will be used.

TheoGB

Ah, thank you. Okay.