I would like to read a data file (such as csv or txt) and mail it using PHP. I would like to be able to have at 5 minute pause in between each send of data. I would also like to use the email field as the senders email. Any help would be appreciated.
Each data chunk will contain:
name
email
address
city
state
zip code
phone
comments
I'm guessing you want to write a newsletter application, so proceeding under that assumption:
You are probably not going to find this answer very helpful, but you should really consider using a newsletter service instead of writing your own code. The reason for this is that sending newsletters requires a LOT more effort and different skills than writing a simple script.
For example, but not exclusively:
Setting up a mailserver correctly.
Taking care about the reverse DNS.
Managing digital signatures (DKIM) for your mail.
Subscribing and tracking sender feedback loops.
Tracking and avoiding DNSBL blocking lists for your server.
etc.
If you really want to write your own code, you have been warned. Take a look at str_getcsv() and SwiftMailer and don't be surprised if you get headaches from this project.
Related
I built support system (web) where my helpdesk can open new tickets/issues.
I want my clients to be able to send email with the issue text and file attache, to specific email address, and new ticket will be opened in my system.
For that I need to know how to scan the folder and how to add the email data to my DB.
what do I need to look for, in the internet, for that? what is the subject?
(I'm using PHP)
As the other's have commented, it's likely a larger task than you're ready to handle. But it doesn't hurt to try.
If I was tasked with the job, I'd take advantage of Gmail (for it's spam reducing features and large storage) to accept incoming email. From there, you simply need to setup a script that connects to your email account and processes the email for storage in your database.
Normally I recommend a solid library for making the job easier and cleaner, but I have a suspicion that you may not be familiar with OOP. If you at least know how to utilize classes, then check out Github:
https://github.com/search?l=PHP&q=imap&ref=searchresults&type=Repositories
Otherwise, if you're new and don't mind writing something "messy" then the following should at least point you in a good direction:
Connecting & retrieving emails for IMAP:
http://www.php.net/imap
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imap-open.php
Fetching/processing attachments:
(note that attachments are part of the email body)
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imap-fetchstructure.php
Storing attachments (in the filesystem):
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mkdir.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-put-contents.php
There's plenty of Googling left for you to do. So go forth and make a lot of mistakes. Read the manual. Kick yourself for not having read it sooner, then go make more mistakes. Isn't that how most of us learn?
The first thing that comes to mind is to pop the most recent emails if you have pop3 set up or use imap functions. I did something similar to this using c# using openpop.net. So that could be a starting point.
You can use this method, using the cURL to fetch the emails from Gmail server through feed atom. XML response will return and we can convert it to HTML.
http://www.code4share.net/items/get-unread-email-in-gmail-by-php/XRGXVVh.html
Our web-based PHP software currently sends out a newsletter to anywhere between 1-2000 recipients. Often the newsletter has a PDF attachment (15KB-5MB). The newsletter does not need to be customized to the individual recipients.
Question: Is it better to send one e-mail that has each recipient blind carbon copied (BCC) or to generate a unique e-mail message for each recipient?
Considerations:
- Which option puts less stress on the mail transfer agent?
- Which option is more efficient programmatically?
- Which option is less resource intensive?
- Are there any limitations to either option? (e.g. BCC having a maximum number)
I've tried Google and I just can't find anyone that has a definitive opinion based on empirical evidence. It's actually hard to find anyone that has an opinion at all.
THANKS: To everyone who contributed to answering this question. Greatly appreciate the feedback from people to ensure we're doing things properly!
Generate a single email per recipient. Use the To field instead of BCC to make it personal.
Advantages
The mail queue will accurately reflect what is happening.
You can distribute the load to multiple email servers.
You can personalize the "To" "Subject" "Body" etc.
You can use tracking URL's.
Mail servers often have a BCC limit per message. You will not hit a limit if you send a single message at a time.
BCC emails typically remain in the queue until all deliveries are complete. It is rare, but we have experienced (with the latest qmail) that sometimes a single recipient will respond with an error that confuses the mail server to send it again, fail, again, fail...until we remove it from the queue. This gets people very upset.
Disadvantages
PHP script has to work harder to generate the individual requests.
There are surely other advantages and disadvantages, but that is the list I follow.
UPDATE: Regarding the PDF attachment, I would recommend providing a download link unless it is crucial to include it with the email.
PDF attachments make an email look more suspicious to spam/virus scanners, because spam is known to try to exploit vulnerable versions of Acrobat. Those PDF attachments might make your newsletter more likely to end up in the recipient's Spam folder.
Large PDF's (1+mb) are not friendly to people checking their email with slow connections or constrained devices such as smartphones.
A link is much smaller than the attachment. You will save upwards to 13GB of bandwidth if you leave off that 5MB attachment!
It depends on MTA infrastructure at your site. If the box that is running your web app is set up to forward all e-mails to some e-mail hub at your ISP then BCC is definitely the advantage. Otherwise, it may save some bandwidth for you but not necessarily (it depends on the actual addresses you send to) Also, I would recommend you not to attach the pdf to the message but place it on the web server and include hyperlink in e-mail. As I got your message is a bulk message. I believe that many people do not read your messages even they opted in to receive.
Instead of attaching such a large file (which might also be rejected by some MTAs because of the size) upload it somewhere on a publicly accessible place (i.e. a web server) and send a simple link to all of the email recipients which they can use to view the PDF.
The good thing about this approach is that you save loads of bandwidth and even if you need different PDFs for every recipient you could still use it.
I'm confused about how mail works in PHP and CakePHP.
1.) What is the difference between sending an email either using the PHP mail function / CakePHP email helper or SMPTP as shown here: http://book.cakephp.org/1.3/en/view/1290/Sending-A-Message-Using-SMTP as the outcome looks the same?
2.) To specify who the email is coming from, you pass in the email in the header, but you can put whatever you want, so what is stopping you from just putting in anything? like yourbank.com? mail('you#gmail.com', "Subject", "Message", "From: <dave#yourbank.com>"); I just tried it and it worked fine and I couldn't find out anyway in Gmail to see if it didn't come from dave at yourbank.com...
Hopefully I can get some light on these two questions. Thanks.
1). CakePHP has a bunch of helpers & functionality implemented to make life easier when developing applications. As you've discovered, Cake has mail functionality. I suggest reading this whole page http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/email.html (It's 2.0 not 1.3, so please not there have been some big alterations between the two versions). The article covers in depth on why you may configure something in a particular manner.
CakePHP is using the default mail function with PHP. It's just allow you to incorporate views into the content and configure the outgoing mail in a much easier manner.
2) As for putting in potentially any email address within the From Header.... this can potentially fall under the category of Email Spoofing, essentially sending an email when it's not authorized from the source (From Header). Again this links back to configuring specific mail servers.
By default mail clients and generally setup to prevent spam and junk, this is done by taking a large amount of steps. Some may be..
Keyword checking, (Checking the contents of an email for any
keywords classified as spam).
Header checking, <--- This is the one that answers your
question.
Essentially... headers are examined and checked to see if the server that the mail was sent from has the authority to use the given from address.
As I don't have enough technical knowledge, i'll throw a few pages your way which discuss setting up records against your DNS/Domain so emails are validated correctly and not put within spam folders.
http://www.ipswitch.com/support/imail/guide/imailgsv8.1/Appendix%20A%20dns4.html
http://help.postageapp.com/kb/application-features/dkim-and-spf-setup-and-validation
How to properly set up DNS SPF records?
I hope my jumbled ramblings make some sort of sense.
Question 1: PHP mail function uses your own server's built in email functionality to send email. If you use SMTP, you're connecting to another server (eg. Google's mail servers) and using that server to send the email.
CakePHP's email component can use either PHP mail, or SMTP, depending on how you configure it.
The outcome is basically the same in many respects. Which way is best for you will depend on your set up, the volume of email you're sending, whether your own server has any restrictions with regards to sending mail, etc. If you Google "PHP mail versus SMTP" or similar, then you'll get some info to help you decide which is best for you.
If you're not sending much email, eg. if you're just wanting to send the results of an enquiry form that gets submitted a few times each day, then just use PHP mail and don't worry about it.
Question 2: Although email programs put various measures in place to make sure mail is legitimate, basically nothing stops fake emails completely. You can send Fake email. Check out this site: http://deadfake.com/Send.aspx and in particular, their FAQ section: http://deadfake.com/FAQ.aspx
Spam filters do their best to catch fake emails, but ultimately it's up to the end user to keep their wits about them, especially with banking emails!
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 working on a project that needs a emailable mailing list built into it with a very complex list structure. Originally I thought I could just use PHPList to do the job with some minor alterations because of its list management. But now I'm finding that I'm going to need to build this from scratch. PHPList is way to complex to make tweaks to.
So I'm looking for recommendations of scripts, classes, functions to help with the processes so I can just focus on the logic and list management.
The requirements are as follows:
User Subscription web form that captures name and email. Double opt-in that sends a confirmation email with a link back to a landing page. (Looking for a simple script to manage this aspect).
Landing page for opt-in confirmation from subscription email. This is where I need to include my list structure. The lists are very deep nested set trees and way beyond the scope of any mailing list I've come across. I'll need to build this part as it is too complex.
User login for future tweaking of their list settings. Would like a script to help with this aspect.
Admin page for constructing the email (html format). Looking for a simple script to help with this process. The site uses CKEditor for most html input so I could just end up using that here. I also then need to link it to the nested set tree list so I'll need to construct this portion myself. Looking for a simple class/script that I can use as a starting point to help with the structure.
Mail manager script. Ideally would like a cron job option to send the emails at a certain time each day/week. Also would like it to stagger the emails with a pause every 25 or so to bypass spam flags. A log file of what got sent where would be ideal. I'll need to construct the logic of what gets sent where because of the list structure. Would like an existing management script as a starting point.
Mailer script. Finally need a class/script to do the actual sending. I've used phpmailer in the past but wondered if there was anything better nowadays.
As I said at the start, PHPList is reasonably close but was far too complicated in its structure to be delving and changing the way it handles the lists. As such I'm looking for scripts that are user-friendly to tweak and hack.
My 2 cents on this:
use utf-8 for all the system
normalize your emails
create a master suppression list
(many domains wont like you sending
emails to them. with this you can
avoid send emails to people who
probably will block you)
sending emails: create a queue:
divide the process in stages: email
rendering / email sending / etc
phpmailer is enough good
abuse of the use of the
"List-unsubscribe" header and many
others
create a really good bounce handling
script (since keep sending to bad
addresses kill the reputation)
setup you rdns for all your sending
ips
use spf and DKYM
clean the email's body from bad
user input.... some users will try
to send "embed" tags on the body..
that kill the sender reputation
follow all ISP/ESP instructions
about: email per connections /
timeouts / etc ..... yahoo! has it
as many others ISP