Hi. Not sure what your requirements are or how many emails you want to send. There's PHPList ( http://www.phplist.com/ ) which is usually available as an installable package on most web hosts and will send email properly for announcement type mailing lists.
Anyway, if you want to write the code yourself, I've covered much of the background on sending email via PHP (and making sure it gets delivered) here in the past few weeks, http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug/browse_thread/thread/bb456d80404d5aed/ but bulk email brings up additional issues: 1) You need to talk to your web hosting company. Sending lots of email will likely result in your email delivery being blocked unless you've spoken to them beforehand. In order to prevent their servers from being blacklisted due to spam, most won't allow you to send bulk email without prior arrangement. If your email addresses aren't from an opt- in database, you're unlikely to get permission. You might also have problems getting permission if you have a list of 100,000 email addresses you want to mail every week. 2) If you use PHP mail(), this generally opens a connection to the mail server for each email sent -- and it does so rather inefficiently. This places a lot of load on the server, and it's completely unnecessary. More intelligent PHP mail delivery interfaces (like PHPMailer: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer or smtpclass: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/14.html ) allow you to send many messages through a single SMTP connection and this reduces load on the mail server. 3) You will almost certainly need to limit sending of email to something reasonable like 1000 - 2000 msgs/hour (or whatever your web hosting company allows if they have an hourly limit). 4) You need to deal with bounces and suspend sending to bad addresses. Something like PHPMailer-BHM: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bmh or bouncehandler: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2691.html will get you started. People seem to be quick to send email through external hosts or use external services, but in my experience this simply is not necessary, what's important is understanding the issues surrounding sending email and ensuring that you don't create problems for yourself. -Craig On 4/06/2009, at 2:36 PM, CrazedMoose wrote: > Is there a good opensource email campaign management tool? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
