Progress bar / animated.gif during phpmailer email send - php

Question

I created a members only based website and when I post new articles, (similar to blog post), I use phpmailer to send an email out to all the members that requested email to be sent to them.
The email contains the new articles content. Title, description etc..
I'm in beta testing stage right now, and with only 3 email accounts it takes about 9 seconds to send out the 3 email when I make a new post. About 3 seconds per email.
I expect to get around 100 users on this site, which would = about 5 minutes to send out all those emails.
Question
Is there a way I can hook up a real time progress bar to show how much time is left when sending the emails?
My setup is like this:
I have my form that is connected to this action script.
<?php
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/core/init.php");
// new data
$title = $_POST['title'];
$description = $_POST['description'];
// query
$addnotice = DB::getInstance()->insert('table1', array(
'title' => $title,
'description' => $description,
));
$id = isset($_POST['id']);
$users = DB::getInstance()->query("SELECT id, title, description FROM table1");
$users = DB::getInstance()->query("SELECT email FROM table2 WHERE notify= 'Yes'");
foreach($users->results() as $u){
User::sendNotification($u->email, $title, '<strong><h2>'.$title.'</h2></strong><p>'.$description.'</p>');
}
Session::flash('newarticle', '<h3 class="white-tx" align="center">The article has been added!</h3>');
Redirect::to('sitepage.php');
?>
The User::sendNotification comes from my user class file that looks like this.
public function sendNotification($to, $subject, $body) {
require_once 'class.phpmailer.php';
$from = "notifier#*******.com";
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->IsSMTP(true); // use SMTP
$mail->IsHTML(true);
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // enable SMTP authentication
$mail->Host = "host***.*******.com"; // SMTP host
$mail->Port = 465; // set the SMTP port
$mail->Username = "notifier#******.com"; // SMTP username
$mail->Password = "********"; // SMTP password
$mail->SetFrom($from, 'Email Robot');
$mail->AddReplyTo($from,'Do Not Reply');
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->MsgHTML($body);
$address = $to;
$mail->AddAddress($address, $to);
$mail->Send();
}
A real time progress bar would be Ideal, but I would even settle for an animated .gif loading image.
Which I tried by adding this to the action script:
echo '<table align="center" width="100%" height="100%" border="0"><tr align="center" valign="center"><td><img src="images/sending.gif"></td></tr></table>';
But that wasn't even recognized and rolled right past the sending.gif image and posted the article to the website and sent the emails.
I've searched Google for tutorials on the subject, but came up dry.
Any thoughts on this situation would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'd suggest to use the BCC of only one email if you do not send personalized mails.
If you want to go for the progress bar, here's a sketch of one way you could go:
Add a database table notifications with fields user_id, notice_id
Insert one row for every user WHERE notify= 'Yes' (why not BOOL here?) and new notice
Have a cronjob poll this table every now and then sending the mails (by fetching the appropriate info from the user and notice table) and removing the respective pending rows
Provide a script returning the current number of pending notifications (json) (num rows of the notification table)
Use JS (i.e. jquery) for periodic updates (http query for the aforementioned script)
(You could also have a boolean field sent if you do not want to delete the rows from the notification table but want to track the notifications.)
You could have:
a submit.php where you insert the required notifications into the table
a mail sending cronjob (i.e. php script or whatever) that removes the pending rows after sending
a poll.php where you provide the current number of rows of the notifications table in JSON format.
a status.php where you periodically request the data from poll.php and update the page accordingly

Answer 2

You can show a progress bar - support for it was introduced in PHP 5.2 - driven by polling it from Javascript. This nice example shows how you can use it with both PHP and jQuery parts. That example is monitoring a file upload, but you can alter it to return anything that changes over time, for example a count while sending your emails in a loop.
As others have mentioned, if you're sending more than a few messages, you need to do it entirely asynchronously as a page load is really not the time to do long operations. For queues, I recommend beanstalkd with Pheanstalk. It doesn't make any difference what email sending class you use as they can all be operated this way (though I'm obviously partial to PHPMailer!).
Your loop is also quite wasteful - there's no need to create, configure and destroy the mailer instance for every message - if your messages have much in common, you can make it much simpler.