Forum Moderators: coopster
To activate the sending of the emails I would make a page where the webmaster enters the newsletter into a form, then on SUBMIT, the script would query a MySQL database containing all the email addresses - one per row - and loop through each one using the php mail function to send the newsletter to each of the 100,000 registered users. That's the basic principle anyway.
Would this cause any problems for the server? It's a normal shared hosting account.
I would be careful not to allow the PHP script to get caught in a tight loop though - a "sleep" of 5ms or 10ms inside the loop would help.
You say "eventually" so I assume this is a scalability question. You want to know if you can scale this up to 100,000 subscribers without having to upgrade the server?
If so, have you thought about what happens if you need to scale beyond 100,000?
We use this method on a shared server, and it's slow when sending 1,400 emails.
Using SendMail? Are you network, CPU or disk bound?
TJ
[edited by: trillianjedi at 1:02 pm (utc) on Oct. 17, 2006]
and keep in mind...all it takes is (1) phone call to cry "spam" to create problems between your ISP and you...
you need to involve them in your plans...they may have some type of solution available to you already...
The other solution it to use one of the huge number of available list management sites out there...
with a list management service, if an issue arises, it's "their" problem...not yours...
Working with the hosting company is indeed something that should be done, as is looking at list management.
70 per minute
4200 per hour
100800 per day
so, roughly 1 million in 10 days
I'm not sure I like those numbers. That also depends if they allow that many emails in those increments and hopefully nothing goes wrong. We dropped our incrememnts for a similar thing down to 100 every 5 minutes because we had a few issues with 100 every minute.
I would think that you should look at 3rd party newsletter companies to manage it.
So you don't have to send 100k mails AT ONCE.
I would think that you should look at 3rd party newsletter companies to manage it.
I'm getting the impression this is the only way, with these numbers. There's also a service quality dimension to all of this, because the (would-be) email recipients are policyholders, of which there are up to a million who are going to be invited to sign up to receive these emailed newletters. Not all, but many will.
Very helpful responses, thanks.
mine only allowed just under 500 at once, though the exact number we could get through varied.
I would think that you should look at 3rd party newsletter companies to manage it.
From a quality perspective I would think that is the best way to go.
However, just so you know, I sent out 40,000 emails last week on a dedicated server which was running 2 busy websites at the time and some other applications, and it didn't cause any problems at all. All the mails were out within a few hours.
It's really not that big a deal. I would definitely put "dedicated server" on the list of options, if you decide that the shared server isn't appropriate or can't handle it.
TJ
