Mailer (cron?)

Anon

Hello all,

I hope someone can help. I have a app. that after a form is entered it mails all the users of an update. Problem, its slow as heck becouse it is mailing and making the user wait to be moved to the next page until the mailer is done. I have searched and seem to think a Cron job will do the trick BUT I have not Idea how..

Any suggestions?????
Please. I beg

Jim

Anon

One non-cron way (can you tell I don't use cron much?) is simply to pass the data you want mailed to another script.

That way the script the user is playing with can end without the mailing being disturbed, and it keeps your user from thinking there is more of your page to load.

Anon

Ok, That is how i would do it in java simply sent it off to another bean to handle but how in PHP?

Any chance you may give an example?

Thanks

Jim

Anon

There is a good cron way to do it.

When a user sends an email, just tell them it's been saved for sending, then write the data to a sort of tasks or to-do database.
Have your cron job call a php page through lynx. This php page looks in your temp table for any jobs, any emails to send, and executes them. Have that php page send all the emails, but not output anything. Have the cron look for jobs every hour or 15 minutes or whatever...

There have been numerous posts explaining this either on here or on Devshed. do a search for cron and you'll come up with something that probably explains it better than I did.. 🙂

---John Holmes...

Anon

Beans that can handle programming?

I tell you, those genetic engineers are amazing.

[/bad programming joke]

The easiest way I know of doing it is passing the data long in post/get format.

Here's my example:

http://crazyoddball.datablocks.net/getpost.html

The source code for the target of that page, getpost.php, is found here:

http://crazyoddball.datablocks.net/getpost.php.txt

The target of that page, mail.php, is here:

http://crazyoddball.datablocks.net/mail.php.txt

Oddly you may need to use view source on the .txr pages to get the PHP code. Not sure why it does that...

In any case.

What that does is take data from the form, which targets your PHP.

getpost.php then takes the data the user submitted, places it into a GET query string, and passes it to mail.php using fopen().

mail.php just displays the data it recieved, rather than doing anything meaningful. All you need to do is have mail.php use whatever method you want it to use, and remove the display part of getpost.php.

One note however. If this does not work, it may be because you have to use fread to actually pass the data along.

If that's true, just use fread($fp, "1") to read one byte of data. That should work, but I don't think you'll need to do even that.

So as you can imagine, you can pass any amount of text data from one form to another in this way.

I'm sure you can also use a POST method or send along non-text data, but I haven't a clue how to do it.

Still trying to figure that out 🙂

Anon

Try this. Load the page notifiying the user that the emails are being sent. Somewhere on the page call a function that runs another external php script on the server to actually send the emails. When you run the other script have it run in the background using "&". This way the script runs on load of the page, runs in the background and php continues to load page the user sees. In the background your email script checks the database or the args for the emails to be sent and quietly exits when its finished. I have the email script return errors by redirecting stderr & stdout to a log file or better yet have it update the records in the database giving you real time info on the status of the queued emails.

call the below function in some page the user sees. mailer.php should contain your code to actually send out the email.

function send_email($email_vars){

exec("/usr/local/bin/php mailer.php > /dev/null 2>&1 &", $returned_error);

}