Mass Emailing from PHP

[Anon]

I need to send out 1-N amount of personalized email from a vhost PHP account and i'm bit concerned about perfomance, timeouts etc. If anybody can help me in the right direction it will be appreciated.

Regards,
Johan Hanekom
[e-mail]
ICQ: 23388331

[Anon]

The connection will time-out if you don't send something to the browser every once in a while. I like to just send out a space after every e-mail or every batch of e-mails. This keeps both apache and your browser from timing out. This of course won't work if you have output buffering turned on.

I would also send them out in about 10 e-mail batches instead of individually. This is quicker than starting sendmail for every e-mail address.

Also, make sure you change the PHP timeout (I think it defaults to like 30 seconds, but whoever installed PHP could have changed that to any value). I set my php.ini file to timeout after only 5 seconds, so I have to increase this for any PHP file that I know will take longer than that.

An alternative is to running it on the web, you could also run the script on your shell. I tend to prefer doing this for long-running scripts.

Bob

[niyogi]

are you using sendmail as your smtp server?

-S

[Anon]

Yes, we are using sendmail.

[jbardin]

Well if the message body is the same you can just use a comma seperated list of email addys for the send-to parameter. Also look in your php.ini file for max_execution_time... porbably will want to crank that up. Also maybe look into using a cgi->command line version of php that would eliminate the browser timeout stuff.

[Anon]

You need to use the flush(); command to stop the browser timing out and the sleep(1); command to slow down the program so that the sendmail program doesnt get overloaded.