Sondra Russell wrote: > Yes, I saw the discussion a few days earlier on this topic, but I'm
But did you check the archives for the same discussion last month, the month before, the month before that, ... :-) > wondering if there is still some unmined wisdom out there about > building a script that sends a newsletter out to 25,000+ people.... > The very impressive class I found (phpmailer-1.41) looked great, but > it didn't *directly* address the high-volume issue in the readme so > I'm still a little nervous. The internal http://php.net/mail function FORKS on each call. In layman's terms, that means that it fires up another copy of "sendmail", a very large and complex program FOR EACH MAIL. Compare this to, say, firing up Microsoft Word on a PC to send each and every email. Needless to say, this simply WILL NOT scale up well. You *can* dink around with timing to try and get mail() to not be over-loaded, but, really, that's just not going to cut it. Your next "crank it up a notch, Emril" (sp?) option is to talk directly to your SMTP server. This is not rocket science. You use http://php.net/fsockopen to the server on port 25, and then you fputs/fgets things like: "HELO yourserver.com" "FRM: [EMAIL PROTECTED]" There's well-documented series of things you are expected to fputs to the server, and responses with error code numbers you are expected to get back. I posted a minimalist sample of how to do this, oh, a couple months ago. However, you *can* use Manuel Lemos' class to deal with it instead, or some other mail package that talks directly to your SMTP server and that may be way easier. That said: *UNLESS* you really, really, need PHP to dynamically create the newsletter content on a person-by-person basis, your *BEST* option is to not use PHP to send the email at all. You can use PHP to compose the email. You can even use PHP to compose the recipient list on-the-fly and save it where the mailing list software needs it. But you really, really, really should be using custom mailing list software for mass emails if you want to keep your server not over-loaded. For starters, the mailing list software code is written in C and has been optimized for longer than PHP has existed, so it goes fast. Secondly, the programs themselves do things that make the email get out in a timely fashion -- For example: Big-time mailing list software will *SORT* the outgoing email by destination address. So all the AOL.com emails will go out, then all the ABC.com emails, ... up through all the Yahoo.com emails. Why? Because at some point, *YOUR* SMTP server has to talk to *THEIR* SMTP server (and/or via other servers that can intermediate for them) and if the emails are sorted by destination, then the software can just keep talking to the same server without re-connecting (or, at least, the connection will likely be in a cache somewhere and re-used). Actually, I don't even know the details of why it goes faster, I just know it does. It's this kind of thing that has kept mailing list software writers up at night, and the PHP Development team (rightly) ignores, as it's not within the realm of what PHP needs to focus on. > And, unfortunately, it's not one of those types of technical > challenges you can keep testing over and over without seriously > annoying the first 100 or so people on your list who *do* get the > email before the script times out. So send it to made-up emails, or get yourself a throw-away domain name on a cheap-o ISP with unlimited email forwarding and make up 40,000 email addresses randomly. (Make *SURE* the ISP knows and agrees to be the "victim" of this test of 40,000 emails every day for testing purposes!!!) It won't be a *REAL* test, since all the emails are going to the same destination, but it's going to be pretty close. > I think the amount of trash email I get each day proves that vast > mailings aren't TOO difficult, but I think I could use a little > wisdom before I give it a shot. Bottom Line: PHP is the wrong weapon. > Anyone? I'll buy you a coke! Buy a CD instead :-) [see below] -- Like music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
