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I am building a program and need to send multiple emails based on certain events. I have coded using the PHP mail function but was advised against its use.
Can somebody explain the difference between the workings of the PHP mail function vs using commercial services like Sendgrid, Mandrill etc? Why would one use these services when I can very well use the free PHP mail function to send mails?
Bulk mailing and campaign management is a complex organizational and technological challenge but will not be helped by most opensource php lib for emails (which simply add html formatting and support for attachments).
They won't handle IPR, SPF, spam trap avoidance, bounce handling, throttling, subscription management and more. Which good bulk emaillers provide.
If you know what you are doing, have full admin rights on your system and NS records and time to write the code, then, yes, you could build the same service - but its not just comparing ants to elephants - its comparing a spanner to an orange.
You cannot send bulk emails in one go using this function.
For example, if you want to send emails to 100k users, you will have to iterate over the emails ids. Yes, you can use the cc though but what if you have a template where in every email the user name will be added like:
Dear User abc
You will have to send one by one. You can't achieve this burst email shoot feature in mail function unless you use multiple processes.
MailQueue is good but I have used it, it does the same things, saves the emails into the database and dequeues the emails and send them one by one.
Again we have swift mailer too.
Again, this is on your requirement. If you don't need to send hundreds of notifications that are time sensitive, you don't need these tools then.
comparing mail() to commercial services is like comparing ant to elephant. mail() is good for some fast notifications from the server if you dont need lots of customisation, but if you want to do something like email campaigns you would have to do a lot of additional server setup and build tons of custom functionallity arround your mail() function. Commercial services are good for campaigns but not notifications (waste of money imho). Try using some opensource php lib for emails, that will have a lot of that custom functionality sorted for you.
First of all, by profession I am a part of a global ESP "Pepipost" which helps brands in delivering the business critical triggered and transactional emails to their customers at the most .
But, the intend of myself here answering this question is not to promote an ESP over PHP mail function. I will share you some facts which we observed during our research at Pepipost Labs.
PHP mail function is just a basic method/the core function to generate the email. But, it cannot deliver your emails at a scale, neither it can help in better deliverability, both of these are key to any businesses.
With the evolution of more sophisticated technologies and algorithms, ISPs (Gmail, yahoo, Outlook and others) and Spam Filters are getting more and more smarter. Before reaching the mailbox, each email passes through all these filters where the content, reputation and other parameters are scanned. Hence, its very important to have good reputed IPs and envelope domains.
Once the email reaches the recipient server either it will get deliver, throttle or bounce. In case of Bounce, Spam Complaint, Unsubscribe, the recipient server will communicate your server, and in that case you need to handle all these properly else the reputation of your domain and IP will goes down.
In case of throttling, another set of complex deliver logics required.
In short, if you are planning to send few hundred emails, then PHP mail function might be ok to use, but to scale further it's important to use a good ESP (Email Service Provider).
Mail() function works very simply on *nix systems, it just executes local command sendmail to send message. It does have disadvantages like:
do not work in many cheap hosting environments
You do not have any information if message is accepted by sending MTA, it could be rejected or quarantined or stay forever in local queue
in some environments it could generate garbled headers because of wrong EOL characters (\r\r\n instead of \r\n)
I think You should use open source library like PHPMailer or Swift Mailer, because it has many more functionality besides simply sending mail.
Some advantages of these libraries:
You could easily send HTML mail with attachments and images
You could send messages through external SMTP services
they have DKIM and S/MIME signing support
PS. I do not use commercial services like Sendgrid, Mandrill, thus can't compare.
I am writing an admin notification sytem for my custom CMS. So I am planning of adding a bcc to all the users of sites. So here are my questions?
Is bcc better than the foreach($user){mail()} function? in terms of server resource usage?
How many bcc's will the server support?
Thank you.
A direct mail to a user is usually the 'nicer' option, as it allows you to personalize it. The advantage for you is that you may get the chance to get some feedback by adding a unique id for each mail to each url that links back to your site. Using bcc is just one mail (from the view of your php server), but you shouldn't really worry about server resources here.
Limits for bcc seem to depend on your provider. I have seen limits ranging from 5 too 500.
Sending too many mails at once may also not work due php processing time limits. For many users you will have to split the sending in both cases.
PHP is just the transporter of your request to the SMTP Server, so there is no limitations in PHP What so ever.
You can check your SMTP Servers limitations to see how many you can actually attach the the email.
using bin carbon copies will not really save you that much resources as the SMTP Server Still has to send an email to all attached recipients, this being said the only thing BCC Does for you is hide the email addresses in each email dispatched.
BCC is, lets say, hidden recipients. So if you'll add recipients to BCC users will receive your message, but their emails will not be displayed in "to" or "copy" list.
Max count of BCC recipients depends on mail server.
Well, this only works if you send the exactly same message with no personal/individual information in it, like all would receive this same message:
hello world
and not
Dear Mr. XY
or
Dear Ms. AB
I'm about ready to unveil a "coming soon" page and one thing I need is a way for users to enter their email address for me to email once the site goes live. What is the best way to do this?
Should I store the emails in a DB and then run a PHP script to email them from my web host? Should I have the emails just kind of be collected and then emailed manually by me either locally or from the server? Is there another way I should do it?
Also, are there certain web-hosts that restrain the amount of emails you can send out, thus causing a problem for mass email.
The only "unknown" currently is how large of a response I'll get...only time will tell.
Thanks guys!
Store it in the database - Yes. It's no unlike storing any other piece of data.
Mass email at once - No
Mass email manually (or individually mail manually) - No
Do some web hosts limit how many you can send at once? - Yes
I don't know the "best" way but I know a really good way. We have built several mass emailing programs and the technique we incorporated was a throttling technique whereby we had a script that ran every three minutes and sent 20 emails at a time.
It keeps the server from choking and the mail queue from exceeding any of our hosts' mail limits.
Store the email addresses in a database and write a batch job that mail merges them into your message and sends them out as needed.
There are dozens of methods you can use for this kind of problem, but unfortunately there's no real way to pinpoint a solution for you, since there are a lot of variables.
If you only get 3 responses, then you might want to just manually email the users from your email client using BCC:. You've already got all the tools you need to do that, and setting up a script might be a waste of time. This isn't really a great long-term solution however.
For most moderate-sized web sites you would store the emails in a database, and use a mailing script to send them out. PHPMailer is a good tool to help with getting mail sent, and you can manage a decent amount of email addresses manually. Managing addresses manually can be a bit of a pain however, as you have to deal with unsubscribe links, script timeouts, bounced email, etc.
If you get up the tens of thousands of email addresses, you may want to start looking at a third-party mailing software or service that can do threaded sending. Looping through and sending email to 50,000 people via a PHP script can be slow, and take hours.
Basically you have to weigh the difficulty, time and cost of each method versus how much flexibility and power you think you're going to need.
To store emails in a db, and sending them out using a cronjob is a good way to solve the problem, if you have constrains regarding the amount of emails you're allowed to send within a period of time, you can handle it by keeping track of how many emails you've sent every time the cronjob runs.
Also, there are open source products to do this, such as phplist http://www.phplist.com/
Like Eric mentioned above, another option is to use a commercial service to manage your mailing list.
I use Mailchimp (http://www.mailchimp.com). They give you everything you need (signup forms, email templates, etc.), and are completely free unless your list grows to more than 500 subscribers.
Writing the emails to a database or a text/log file are both fine ways to store the emails.
Depending on how many emails you receive, you may want to write a program (PHP works) to send a separate email to each person. Don't send a mass email from your regular email client with everyone on a big To: line.
There are also commercial programs that manage mailing to lists of people (probably open source ones, too). Most of those commercial ones offer a free trial period.
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.
I am developing email queue module for my php application. So all emails(user notifications, password reminder ...) will be put into the queue and will send by cron process based on the priority of emails. But i will have news letter module soon. so my question is either to keep newsletter in seperated queue or can be used the centralized queue since i have priority attribute for all emails ?
Thanks.
Word of caution: Do you have experience building email senders? It's a hairy adventure and you're almost always better off outsourcing the task. Email deliverability is not easy or predictable.
You can stick with one queue, but be sure to have the ability to specify which IP address a particular email can be sent from. You'll want to have different IP addresses for sending newsletters, signups, invoices, etc. And even further, you'll want to have an IP for sending newsletters to trusted addresses and untrusted addresses.
If you can do them with the same module, I'd consider that preferable since there's less code to worry about.
The only potential problem I can see is the differing nature of the two email types. User notifications and password reminders would tend to have one recipient. Newsletters would be emailed to all of your users at once.
If this doesn't cause a problem (and you can't see any other problems), I'd stick with the one-mailer-to-rule-them-all approach.
as Gary Richardson mentions, email deliverability can be tricky.
This is not an ad. But I highly recommend PostMarkApp.com. I am not related to that company in any other way than as a paying customer (well, my company pays).
They have a mail delivery system and a API that you can use from your PHP scripts. You just submit your mails to their queue, and they will do the sending and handle spam reports, bouncing, etc. And their API allows you to know which of your messages bounced and handle them.
This service is the equivalent of CampaignMonitor for raw email sending. BTW, you cannot send newsletters through PostMarkApp, they only allow one-to-one emails (like your user notifications and password reminders).
A few years ago I started building my own email delivery script, until the hosting company mentioned there was a maximum of 500 emails per day. Then I used a 'newsletter' delivery system, with some hacky work-arounds to make it do what I wanted. It was a mess.
Until recently, we were also using another custom-made mail-delivery script but, as Gary Richardson said, you need to take into account IPs, bounces, etc. I find the postmark thing so exciting (in a geeky way) it's embarrassing :D
Having said that, once you are outsourcing the actual delivery of your mails, you could have one single mail queue for your system, using your priority levels. In this way, your application would add mails to your own mailing queue, and your mailing system would deliver it to the outsourced platform. This is preferred to trying to send the email straight away during a page refresh after a user presses submit or similar.
PS: If anybody knows of any service similar to postmark, please let me know!
Give SendGrid a look. Seems to be working great for us after recently realizing that handling email is not worth the dev time.