Deleting multiple entries

foamy

Warning beginner question.

We have a mailing list with a few thousand entries which I have in mysql. The first time we did a mailing there were hundreds of bounced addresses. The mailing program stores a list of the bounces, but doesn't remove them from the master list.

The question is, can I automatically search for all of the bounced emails and delete them from the master email list? I have PHP4 and Mysql running on the server.

Thanks. ChrisM

Anon

the answer is (as usual) yes - it depends.

First trick is how are the bounced addresses stored? in MySQL? in a text file?

in either case, the general plan is this:

step through the list of bounced emails and "delete from address_table where email=$email" - or something to that effect. If you could work from user ID's or something, that would probably be safer.

Of course, this deletes your entire record for that email, which is what I assumed you wanted. If you just want to delete the email address from the record, you need to use an update query instead.

foamy

thanks craig.

The emails are in a text file, but I could put them in MySQL... and I would want to only delete the email, not the entire record.

So is the idea that I select all the bounced emails from the table in mysql, then step through them with a while statement, updating the "main" table?

If that's the idea and you could point me in the direction of a snippet of code I could back up the DB and try getting it to work for me.

Thanks again.

Anon

yep.

I've not stepped through lines of text in a text file, but I'm sure its possible, you'd just have to do more research... :-)

you have the basic idea if you put the addresses in the DB (while statement, etc...)

it sounds like you don't really need code (you sound like you have the hang of it).

if the bounced emails were in the DB:
basic outline:

perform query to get all the user ID's of the bounced emails (alternatively, you could get the bounced emails addresses themselves - ID's are better)
using a while loop, go through each address and perform an UPDATE query that sets the value of the email address to NULL.
(i.e. "UPDATE address_table SET email=NULL WHERE email=$email_from _list")
print "this address deleted: address" or something to confirm to the screen.

Others may have an idea how to step through a text file, or you could look up what to do at php.net -> you basically want to read the file in to an array, then step through the array in a similar fashion as you would with a mysql result object.