Dave --

...and then Dave G said...
% 
% PHP Gurus,
%       I currently run a few newsletters that go out to small groups of
% 50 to 100 people. I use a while loop to send out the emails. I chose a
...
% about 50 people. I'm not sure exactly, but maybe ten seconds, possibly
% as high as twenty.
%       Soon I will be creating a script to send out an email to 500
...
%       So my question is, is there a way more efficient than while
% loops to send out multiple emails with personalized information? Is it
% the mail() command that takes time, or the mysql_fetch_array(), or both?
%       Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

0) That really should be $member['name'] and $member['email'] instead of
bare indices, you know :-)

1) It's definitely the mail() command, and that's dependent on the
underlying mail system.

2) Driving this from the browser is probably a bad way to go because you
will always be fighting timeout issues *and* what about a broken connection
not because of a timeout?

3) If you want full personalization, you're stuck with individual emails,
but lots of mailing list software out there can handle VERPing and, say,
footers and save you a whopping lot of work.

4) I did some work this summer on a mass mail script; with a little script
tweaking and some (but not onerous) qmail tweaking, I got our times down
to around 100ms per email.  That puts us sending about 30k [personalized]
emails per hour, which is an order of magnitude faster than the speed of
the guys who lost the contract to us :-)  It's discussed on the list a
bit; check the archives.


HTH & HAND & Happy Holidays

:-D
-- 
David T-G                      * There is too much animal courage in 
(play) [EMAIL PROTECTED] * society and not sufficient moral courage.
(work) [EMAIL PROTECTED]  -- Mary Baker Eddy, "Science and Health"
http://justpickone.org/davidtg/      Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!

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