Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Programming Discussion : How to send thosands of mails efficiently

[saeed]

Hi,
i hav to send some promotional mails to thousands of users after every 15 days, there are 7 to 8 different types of mail which goes to every customer in a particular order....can u tell me how can i optimize this process coz there are arroned 2 to 3 lacks users and i dont want to send all of them at once, i m trying to make a webservice which execute after every 1 hour, but facing one one problem how to break the number of records, dont want to make a temporary table..
thx

[Rich2k]

If it's legitimate marketing (opt-in) email your best bet is a decent list server, although they aren't cheap, but they do at least have their own SMTP servers to balance the load and handle unsubscribe requests and bounces automatically for you.

[Quickcess]

hello!
If you have unique id assigned to each of your addresses you might consider creating doing the following:
1. script send messages to 300 users (just an example number) starting from the very first from your base
2. script outputs the id of last user to a file (e.g. lastuser.php)
3. after 1 hr go to step 1 and repeat starting from the id read from lastuser.php

The solution might increase your server load a bit but that's not an issue since the database is relatively not big and requests are made only once an hour.

P.S. PHP gurus, please, don't kick me It's just a try

[Rich2k]

Originally posted by Quickcess
hello!
If you have unique id assigned to each of your addresses you might consider creating doing the following:
1. script send messages to 300 users (just an example number) starting from the very first from your base
2. script outputs the id of last user to a file (e.g. lastuser.php)
3. after 1 hr go to step 1 and repeat starting from the id read from lastuser.php

The solution might increase your server load a bit but that's not an issue since the database is relatively not big and requests are made only once an hour.

P.S. PHP gurus, please, don't kick me It's just a try

It really depends on how many addresses there are, whilst it might not put a load on your PHP script it has got a good chance of loading your SMTP or mail program.

If it's only 300 an hour then it would probalby be fine, so long as you don't have a PHP exeuction timeout that you reach!

[Tom|420]

What about loading the list into a SQL database? You could then use a column which acts as a flag to tell wether or not the mail was sent out. Send one bunch of mails with (example):

SELECT * from SOMEDB WHERE sent='no' LIMIT=300

Just an idea, never tried myself.

Also you should give a short dalay between each e-mail sent (200 ms is enough) to let the SMTP server relax a bit and not monopolize it. You should also make sure that you're script won't expire (by default a script is stopped after 30 secs).

[MiSV]

Yeah, we do that. The actual system is way more complicated though; there are normalized tables for types of emails to send, a scheduler and, a bot that oversees load, bounce messages, scheduling, and the cron job that performs the scheduled tasks..

[=-D]

what you need is pear's mail_queue. the forum gay'ed me saying i cant post url's until i post 5 messages O_o.. so just google this "pear mail_queue", you'll get it

enough said