Writing my own mass-email script in PHP

Hi, all. Sorry, first off, for the kidna weird selection of crossposted
groups, but this question touches on aspects of discussion in each of the
groups.

So I have a group of around 500 email addresses to which I would like to
send a mass email occasionally. The group will never be much larger than
500 email addresses and will occasionally be about half that size.

I have written a simple HTML interface and PHP backend to process the
mail. HTML form wiht "subject" and "message body" fields. PHP then gets
all this, gets a list of addresses from a database, and sends the email
out.

What is a good way to proceed with this?

I would like to Bcc: the names on the list so that the "To:" is "Mail
List<maillist@mydomain.edu>" (which is a dummy email address).

I tried using the PHP mail() function and it *seemed* to work, almost.
That is to say, I had added all the names to a long list of Bcc: headers,
and put the extra Bcc: headers in the extra headers argument to the PHP
mail() function. This seemed to work, in that it seemed like everyone got
the email; however, the mail() function came back with a failure error.

I thought about it a bit and researched a little and found that maybe a
really long Bcc: list is not the best idea, for spam reasons (my
message is more likely to be marked as spam) and for other similar
reasons. So I was considering looping through the 500 email addresses and
doing a separate mail() for each, but putting each email address in the
To: field. This sounds like a lot of overhead, though, and I'm afraid of
this thing timing out or crapping out or Something Bad(TM) happening.

I am currently using Sendmail, Linux (Red Hat 9), Apache 1.3.x, and PHP
4.3.8.

I am not crazy about the idea of installing EZMLM only because I would
need to install Qmail and, although that may be a good idea in the long
run, it looks like a bitch (if the length of this page --
http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html -- is any indication!) I am not
really very experienced with MTA administration!

So, any suggestions? Any comments? Anything?

Thanks!!

--
Jeffrey D. Silverman | jeffreyPANTS@jhu.edu
Website | http://www.newtnotes.com

Drop "PANTS" to reply by email

"Jeffrey Silverman" <jeffrey@pantsjhu.edu> wrote in message
news:pan.2004.09.27.16.22.47.589264@pantsjhu.edu.. .
> Hi, all. Sorry, first off, for the kidna weird selection of crossposted
> groups, but this question touches on aspects of discussion in each of the
> groups.
>
> So I have a group of around 500 email addresses to which I would like to
> send a mass email occasionally. The group will never be much larger than
> 500 email addresses and will occasionally be about half that size.
>
> I have written a simple HTML interface and PHP backend to process the
> mail. HTML form wiht "subject" and "message body" fields. PHP then gets
> all this, gets a list of addresses from a database, and sends the email
> out.
>
> What is a good way to proceed with this?

I've got something like this that sends all the mails out individually
according to recipients specified in a MySQL table. I've sent to just over
1500 people and it worked fine.

It also has an online thing so that you can edit the actual message that
goes out.

If you want, e-mail me offline and I'll zip up the relevant files and send
them to you. I can't promise that the code will be very elegant but you're
welcome to it.

Andy

Jeffrey Silverman wrote:

> I tried using the PHP mail() function and it *seemed* to work, almost.
> That is to say, I had added all the names to a long list of Bcc: headers,
> and put the extra Bcc: headers in the extra headers argument to the PHP
> mail() function. This seemed to work, in that it seemed like everyone got
> the email; however, the mail() function came back with a failure error.

You could select a smaller number of adresses to bcc: and then loop all your
emails in groups, this would lessen the send load on your mailserver, and at
the same time allow you to send the same message to all the users in your list.


//Aho

Hello,

On 09/27/2004 01:22 PM, Jeffrey Silverman wrote:
> I tried using the PHP mail() function and it *seemed* to work, almost.
> That is to say, I had added all the names to a long list of Bcc: headers,
> and put the extra Bcc: headers in the extra headers argument to the PHP
> mail() function. This seemed to work, in that it seemed like everyone got
> the email; however, the mail() function came back with a failure error.
>
> I thought about it a bit and researched a little and found that maybe a
> really long Bcc: list is not the best idea, for spam reasons (my
> message is more likely to be marked as spam) and for other similar
> reasons. So I was considering looping through the 500 email addresses and
> doing a separate mail() for each, but putting each email address in the
> To: field. This sounds like a lot of overhead, though, and I'm afraid of
> this thing timing out or crapping out or Something Bad(TM) happening.
>
> I am currently using Sendmail, Linux (Red Hat 9), Apache 1.3.x, and PHP
> 4.3.8.

You are right. Putting all recipients in Bcc: is not a good idea because
like you noted, some mailbox providers like Hotmail will tag the
messages as junk when the recipient address does not come in a visible
header (To: or Ccc:). Some ISP may also limit the number of recipients
per message that is queued.

Since you use sendmail and your messages are not that urgent, my
suggestion is to configure it to queue all the messages and deliver them
later when the queue is processed next time. This way sendmail will not
hold your PHP script waiting for each delivery.

If you are not aware how to do that, you may want to try this class for
composing and sending e-mail messages that comes with a subclass
specialized in deliveryng via sendmail that provides an option that lets
you tell to defer the delivery of your messages.

If you are not personalizing the messages (which I strongly advise for
efficiency reasons) you may also want to tell the class to cache your
message bodies so it does not waste time rebuilding the message body for
each recipient. You can still personalize the message headers like the
To: header as you need.

http://www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage



--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP
http://www.phpclasses.org/

PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products
http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/

Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator
http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 14:35:23 -0300, Manuel Lemos wrote:

> http://www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage

Thanks! This looks promising...

--
Jeffrey D. Silverman | jeffreyPANTS@jhu.edu
Website | http://www.newtnotes.com

Drop "PANTS" to reply by email

Jeffrey Silverman wrote:

> So I have a group of around 500 email addresses to which I would like to
> send a mass email occasionally. The group will never be much larger than
> 500 email addresses and will occasionally be about half that size.
This was the subject of a question I ask about a membership list about a
year or two ago.

If you will do a google groups search for 'membership list' without the
quotes as a subject, you should find 6 or 8 messages that answer your
question.

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 12:22:48 -0400, Jeffrey Silverman wrote:

> Hi, all. Sorry, first off, for the kidna weird selection of crossposted
> groups, but this question touches on aspects of discussion in each of the
> groups.
>
> So I have a group of around 500 email addresses to which I would like to
> send a mass email occasionally. The group will never be much larger than
> 500 email addresses and will occasionally be about half that size.
>

>> snip <<<

Hi,
I have worked on something like that, I ended up installing bulk_mailer:
ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/moore/bulk_mailer/
This is a C program which will do quite smart mass-mailing, I have used it
once or twice for the about 5000 subscribers of my newsletter, it worked
without problems.

Since I do everything in PHP as well, and needed to write a web-based
frontend for this newsletter, I simply used the system function from PHP
to use bulk_mailer. It looked something like that:
system('/bin/cat '.PATH_MESSAGE.' | '.PATH_BULK_MAILER.' '.$from.'
'.PATH_RECIPIENTS.' > '.$path_log.' 2>/dev/null');

Before this, I first wrote the newsletter to a file (PATH_MESSAGE), and
the recipients to a file (PATH_RECIPIENTS).
As you can see in the command above, I pipe the contents of the message
(PATH_MESSAGE) into bulk_mailer (PATH_BULK_MAILER), then set the sender
($from) and recipient list (PATH_RECIPIENTS) arguments for bulkmailer.
Finally, I redirected the output into a log ($path_log) and ditched any
error output.

Of course you will have to write some error checks and elsewhat before
using this, but it could give you a hint.

The good news is, bulk_mailer works with sendmail, the bad news is,
bulk_mailer does not seem to work with qmail :(

DrTebi