I am building a site through WordPress and coded in my own bulk email. I used a plugin to ensure that emails are sent authentically through my gmail account. I use wp_mail to trigger the email.
My first strategy was to send to: myself and bcc: everyone. This gave a gmail error for too many recipients.
Then, I split the email into chunks of 49, and it worked well. Now, I’m creating an unsubscribe link and I realized that I have no way to include the recipients email address in the email because it’s the same email bcc’d to 50 people.
What is the best approach to solve this problem? Can I send to: hundreds of people without gmail getting upset at me?
No, usually you can't send hundreds of mails just like that, you will be blocked and it may have repercussions like having your domain-name credibility hurt for a long time.
there are several ways:
Ask your Hoster about his stance. For example, my Hoster allows 1 Mail every 1.5 seconds in average. I'm using a cronjob that calls a wordpress endpoint in which i loop thru several 1000 emails (legit newsletters), each loop 2 seconds of break. this is just an example, it doesn't make quite sense, but the important part is: set the timeout fresh on each loop, set a sleep. i tested this with 100000 mails and it worked without a hitch on the website.
for ($i = 1; $i <= $total; $i++) {
set_time_limit(20);
sleep(2);
wp_mail($email, $subject, $body); //i set up an smtp plugin for this
}
Another, and frankly more professional solution, is using a service like mailgun.com, there you can hammer as many mails thru their API as you want. But of course, it costs some $ :-)
Related
I want to make a PHP newsletter sender for a few hundred people, say monthly.Does it work for me to send all the emails through a for() loop? i.e. will it use an excessive amount of resources? Also, should I sleep() for a period between each email I send? Note: to send the emails, i use the PEAR Mail::factory('smtp' ...); function.
If you're sending to a couple of hundred people, there shouldn't be too many problems.
Things to bear in mind are whether you're going to be sending individual emails, or if you're sending the same email to multiple people using BCC - the former will mean you send fewer emails, but you can't then personalise them at all.
You can definitely loop through the database with a for loop; if you're going to be sending individual emails, then I would recommend the occasional sleep(), too, just so you don't hit the mailserver too hard. It might be worth talking to them first, to let them know - they'd probably appreciate knowing that you're going to be doing that, especially if your newsletter subscribers grow into the thousands.
You can use a for loop for sending 100 emails, but I don't know about the sleep(). I have sent 200 mails at a time using PHP mailer in a for loop.
I'm using a homemade PHP script with PHPmailer for sending email, currently I just do one select statement in MYSQL and then run a 100-150 email send request from PHPmailer via a for loop.
my problem is that I have to port this script to a 7000 user mailing list, and I know it's not going to hold up since sending to 150 takes about 8 secs of execution time - also sending 7000 emails might mark me as a spammer or I won't be able to handle all responces.
I thought about splitting the 7000 into groups of like 200-500 and sending an email to each group every day until sending everyone - to do that i'll have to write a PHP script that handles the limits and remembers when & who on the list hasn't received that email yet and is due to receive it on the next batch.
What are my options, what are your thoughts?
Just my 2 cents.
1) I agree with Dave re: make it take longer than it needs. Most black/grey listing is the the recipient mail server deciding there is an odd amount of traffic compared to usual. Yahoo is terrible for this and given the sheer volume of domains they deal with, it can get annoying.
2) Using multiple IP addresses doesn't hurt. Extra IPs are usually free, and if you are using exim, you can easily configure it to use each IP based on e.g. EHLO, or send to domain etc etc. This means that there is less volume coming from any one IP.
3) Keep a track of bounce backs. Some providers will keep a track of the number of attempts to deliver mail to a non-existent address, the more you try, the more suspicious it looks. Easiest way to keep a track of them in my experience is to use VERPs and get PHP to process the incoming data.
4) Set up reverse DNS. Some hosts will just ignore the mail if you have not got it set up for the sender. I believe AOL is an example.
Just a few pointers from my experience.
Your first approach is a pretty good idea. As long as you're ok with it taking about 3 minutes to send all the emails (which it should be, if you're only sending a weekly newsletter or the like). To reduce the chance of getting marked spam, lower the threshold or make it take longer. Beyond that, it might be a good idea to move into a hosted mass mailing service.
The act of sending 7000 [or more] emails is not going to get you marked as a spammer ~assuming~ that the mail you are sending is:
not spam
contains complete & accurate header information
The only problem you might get is clogging up your mail queue, but you r volume is still pretty low. I would say for scalability - throttle your delivery over about an hour or so.
and consider ceejayoz's suggestion "MailChimp" it's free up to 5000 emails/month and has an excellent API that you can literally integrate into your app in a couple of hours.
-sean
I have been working on this subject for a long time now and to be honest I am in need of some help if you guys have some time to answer to my problem ;)
I have a few k of emails in my database (around 2k and coming up...) and I would like to send two newsletters a week ... what would be the best way to achieve that ?
So far here is what I am doing :
- a script php (with meta tag refresh set to 600) which sends every 10 minutes an email to 50 people (using basic mail() function). It runs for 6 hours to get to the 2k emails. I am using the less expensive shared server at 1and1 (2EUR a month :D).
1- Is this way to proceed a good way ? I heard when you put people in BCC you go to SPAM directly ... Also many people do not even receive the emails ... no idea why. So far it is not really conclusive.
2- Do you think it would worth taking the dedicated server and send 1 email to each people thats to say 2k different emails ? Or is it a bad move ?
3- How do people proceed when sending newsletters ? I'm sure I look ridiculous with 2k emails and though I have difficulties in making my way through this ;)
Any help welcome.
Cheers.
G/
maximize time between connections to same mail servers
maximize number of servers you use
send to one person at a time
include images, text and html version, unsubscribe link
Check what mail servers respond (like IP blocking notice with link to unblock)
And yes, use cron
I need to send about ~20k emails to potential clients and need the best way to avoid:
server crash
being put in spammers list
I've searched a few forums and people said it's best to send mails in 1k packages
but my question is what delay between sending each 1k should I set? I mean 1k/day or 1k/hour or 1k/min etc.
I recently had to build system to do so, here is the solution we chose :
1- The management system setup emails and store them in a database.
2- We setup a no-reply account on our mail server to get the bounces back.
3- We build a small code over the great mailing library swiftmailer (swiftmailer.org).
4- We run the script we build through a cron and send mails in packages of 50 per minute (hotmail will most likely flag email as spam if too much emails are sent from the same adresse/server in the same minute). We store each swiftId i the mail database
5- At the runtime of the mail sending script we check for bounces or other errors in our no-reply mailbox and flag our messages in our mail table accordingly (status : 1 - success, 2 - invalid email, 3 - bounces)
6- We sync back our data (upon user accessing the section of the system) in the main system when they have a status and that the last change was made at least 10 minutes in the past to limit the change of states in the system. (the synchronisation script can change the status of an item in the main system, but the 10 minutes delay reduce the risk of changes)
I think your 1K thing is a red herring. There have been a number of similar questions asked with good answers, have a look though these:
How do you make sure email you send programmatically is not automatically marked as spam?
Avoid being blocked by web mail companies for mass/bulk emailing?
Sending solicited mass email
Note that the primary requirement to avoid being your mail being marked as spam is NOT TO SEND SPAM. Your description sounds a lot like spam, in which case no amount of clever tricks will help you.
Providing you are not actually sending spam, a professional organisation such as http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ or http://www.mailchimp.com/ is probably cheaper than the amount of time you will require to do this properly.
Your best bet is to farm it out to specialists.
There's a whole load of subtleties about mass mailing that are easy to get wrong.
Best case is that your server gets put on an email blacklist - meaning all your mails from now on get binned as spam. Worst case is fines and/or jail time, depending n your local laws and the laws where the recipients live.
When it comes down to being put in spammers lists, the question is, how many (very) similar mails from the same sender reach a certain host. If you flood yahoo-mail-accounts with thousands of mails within a short period of time, you can be sure to be on their list shortly.
What you can do: pay a professional service to send out the mails for you. They usually have contracts with the big providers so you don't end up on anyones blacklist (will cost you money, though).If you're sending them out from your server, make sure the "reverse DNS lookup" for your server is activated - I don't know if that's checked any more but it gave me a hard time once.
If your mails don't need to be sent out at a certain time, I'd send the mails in very small packages, e.g. not more than one mail per second, not too much in a row. Then wait for a certain amount of time and repeat until all mails have been sent.A company I used to work for would send out not more than 200 and then wait half an hour before the program proceeded. As far as I know, we never ended up on some blacklist.
The spam list has been well answered, but as far as not bombing out your server, the answer is generally the same. Use a service that does this for you.
If you absolutely must send this volume of e-mail on your own, you want to do it with some sort of background service. This can be written in anything (provided that you don't simply buy one of the many pieces of software off the shelf), but ideally it should be multi-threaded.
Your management application should not be sending these e-mails... only queuing them up in a database or something.
Again though, why reinvent the wheel? You'll save yourself a lot of time by going with something off-the-shelf.
I am currently writing a music blog. The administrator posts a new article every 2-3 days. Once the administrator posts an article, a mass email will be sent to around 5000 subscribers immediately.
What is the best way to implement the mass mail feature?
Does the following function work?
function massmail()
{
$content = '...';
foreach ($recipients as $r) {
$_content = $content . '<img src="http://xxx/trackOpenRate.php?id='.$r.'">';
mail($r, 'subject', $_content);
}
}
Another question: If all 5000 subscribers are using Yahoo Mail, will Yahoo treat it as a DDOS attack and block the IP address of my SMTP server?
First off, using the mail() function that comes with PHP is not an optimal solution. It is easily marked as spammed, and you need to set up header to ensure that you are sending HTML emails correctly. As for whether the code snippet will work, it would, but I doubt you will get HTML code inside it correctly without specifying extra headers
I'll suggest you take a look at SwiftMailer, which has HTML support, support for different mime types and SMTP authentication (which is less likely to mark your mail as spam).
I would insert all the emails into a database (sort of like a queue), then process them one at a time as you have done in your code (if you want to use swiftmailer or phpmailer etc, you can do that too.)
After each mail is sent, update the database to record the date/time it was sent.
By putting them in the database first you have
a record of who you sent it to
if your script times out or fails and you have to run it again, then you won't end up sending the same email out to people twice
you can run the send process from a cron job and do a batch at a time, so that your mail server is not overwhelmed, and keep track of what has been sent
Keep in mind, how to automate bounced emails or invalid emails so they can automatically removed from your list.
If you are sending that many emails you are bound to get a few bounces.
This is advice, not an answer: You are much, much better off using dedicated mailing list software. mailman is an oft-used example, but something as simple as mlmmj may suffice. Sending mass mails is actually a more difficult task than it actually appears to be. Not only do you have to send the mails, you also have to keep track of "dead" addresses to avoid your mail, or worse, your mailserver, being marked as spam.
You have to handle people unsubscribing for much the same reason.
You can implement these things yourself, but particularly bounce handling is difficult and unrewarding work. Using a mailing list manager will make things a lot easier.
As for how to make your mail palatable for yahoo, that is another matter entirely. For all its faults, they seem to put great stock in SPF and DomainKey. You probably will have to implement them, which will require co-operation from your mail server administrator.
You may consider using CRON for that kind of operation. Sending mass mail at once is certainly not good, it may be detected as spam, ddos, crash your server etc.
So CRON could be a great solution, send 100 mails at once, then wait a few minutes, next 100, etc.
Do not send email to 5,000 people using standard PHP tools. You'll get banned by most ISPs in seconds and never even know it. You should either use some mailing lists software or an Email Service Provider do to this.
Why don't you rather use phplist? It's also built on top of PHP Mailer and a lot of industry leaders are using it. I've used it myself a couple of times to send out bulk mails to my clients. The nice thing about phplist is that you can throttle your messages on a domain level plus a time limit level.
What we've also done with a couple of internal capture systems we've got was to push our user base to the mailling list and then have a cron entry triggering a given mail each day. The possibilities are endless, that's the awesome thing about open source!
Also the Pear packages:
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Mime
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Queue
sob.
PS: DO NOT use mail() to send those 5000 emails. In addition to what everyone else said, it is extremely inefficient since mail() creates a separate socket per email set, even to the same MTA.
Also have a look at the PHPmailer class. PHPMailer
You can use swiftmailer for it. By using batch process.
<?php
$message = Swift_Message::newInstance()
->setSubject('Let\'s get together today.')
->setFrom(array('myfrom#domain.com' => 'From Me'))
->setBody('Here is the message itself')
->addPart('<b>Test message being sent!!</b>', 'text/html');
$data = mysql_query('SELECT first, last, email FROM users WHERE is_active=1') or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($data))
{
$message->addTo($row['email'], $row['first'] . ' ' . $row['last']);
}
$message->batchSend();
?>
I already did it using Lotus Notus and PHP.
This solution works if you have access to the mail server or you can request something to the mail server Administrator:
1) Create a group in the mail server: Sales Department
2) Assign to the group the accounts you need to be in the group
3) Assign an internet address to the group: salesdept#DOMAIN.com
4) Create your PHP script using the mail function:
$to = "salesdept#DOMAIN.com";
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
It worked for me and all the accounts included in the group receive the mail.
The best of the lucks.
There is more into it aside from using a software. If you could create a bulk emailer program that sends intermittently. Say if you will send 5,000 recipients, create a loop that would send 38 lists per sending then pause for 10 seconds. I have an actual experience sending 500 manually per days for the past weeks and so far i have good results.
Another consideration are the content of your email. Nowadays it is a standard that you need to put your physical office address and the "unsubscribe" opt-out. These are factors that majority of recipient emails servers are checking. If you don't have these they will classify you as spammer.
Mailchimp is my best recommendation to use if you want a paid service provider in sending to your email subscriber NOT sending unsolicited or cold email marketing.
Hope it helps.