Posted by Miles Thompson on 10/07/57 11:26

At 10:50 AM 9/12/2005, Ryan A wrote:
>Hi,
>My client has a dating site and now he wants to mail all his members,
>he does not want to use any of the already installed mailing lists but wants
>us to make one
>for him, he's on a dedicated server.
>
>Presently he does not have too many members, just a few thousand (around 3k
>i guess),
>I remember reading sometime back on the list that using the mail() may not
>be the best
>option...not sure if thats still true.
>
>The thing that bothers me the most is if the program times out..., how do I
>start again from
>the ones that have not been sent?
>
>eg:
>(10 members)
>mail gets sent to first 4 members then times out
>we re-click on the send button and it starts again from one...again times
>out
>(this happens 5 times)
>
>that means members 1-4 will get the same email 5 times
>
>Doing this the hard way would be to connect to the db after each successful
>mail and "mark"
>each member with todays date or something...but I would like to avoid so
>many calls to the
>DB if possible...esp if the site grows.
>
>Ideas/suggestions?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Ryan


We send to 1,000 subscribers each night, here's the guts of the code.
There's one call to fetch the names and email addresses from the database.

while( $row = mysql_fetch_array( $result ) )
{
$first_name = $row[ first_name ];
$last_name = $row[ last_name ];
$email = $row[ email ];

/* recipient */
$recipient = $email;

/* send it */
$lMailedOK = mail($recipient, $subject,
$message, $headers);
if ($lMailedOK != 0 )
{
$lMailedOK = "OK";
}else{
$lMailedOK="<b>FAILED</b>";
}
echo $recipient . " - " . $lMailedOK ."<br>";
// give ourselves more time
set_time_limit( 20 );
} //$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result )

$message is built higher up in the process - I keep resetting the time out
- set_time_limit(20).
After each message is sent, $lMailedOK and the names are echoed to the browser.

When the process completes, we know who it went to and if the call to
mail() succeeded.

Hope this is helpful - Miles Thompson

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