sending bulk mail through php

[Anon]

Hi,

I have a table in a mysql database containing email addresses of contacts. I'm building a mailing list, which sends an email to everyone in the table. My code is along the lines of :

// find members in db

$res = mysql_query("SELECT email FROM member_tbl");
$numrows = mysql_num_rows($res);

// are there any?

if ($numrows > 0) {
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($res)) {
$email_to = $row["email"];

// email member the newsletter

$email_subject = "www.domain.com";
$email_message =  "$newsletter\r\n\r\n";				

mail($email_to, $email_subject, $email_message, "From: [e-mail]\nReply-To: [e-mail]");
}

}

my question is - is this a suitable way to send bulk email? as the number of records in the table increases, will the server struggle to cope? It's a bit awkward because I can't send email from my development server so I can't really test performance.

If there is a more efficient method to send bulk email, I would be grateful for the advice.

cheers.

[melmoth]

No it is not a good solution:

if there is a lots of mail,the code execution may be longer than 30 seconds and you may have a time out error.

What happens if a mail is not corrctly send ?

You would better run some perl script via a crontab that will effectively check if each mail has been correctly send.

[Anon]

melmoth has a good point.

Don't make this web based. If you get to emailing a lot of users (> 1000) or so you will probably get timed out on your http request and the page will stop loading, and thus stop emailing people. It then turns into a mess of trying to find who got emailed and who didn't. I recommend this:

Build an sql table where you can upload the subject and body of your email message.

Set up a cron to run a php script (or whatever kind of script you want) every 5 minutes or so that will check to see if any new messages have been uploaded and then use the script to send out the messages. Works like a charm.

[Anon]

thanks for the replies - seems like my method was a bit far off the mark!

Excuse my ignorance, but I'm unsure what a cron is. Could you explain this and how I might set one up?

cheers

[Anon]

hi there.

Cron is a unix scheduler.

A nice way to have jobs done every once in a while.

Have a look at

man 8 cron
then
man 5 crontab

Then create your own crontab with

crontab -e

Have a nice day.