I have a simple user signup form with a checkbox that lets users get a daily email notification if there was activity on any of their projects...much like Stack Overflow has a "Notify xxx#example.com daily of any new answers".
My current thinking to implement this in a LAMP environment is as follows:
In the user database, set a boolean value if the user wishes to receive a daily email.
If there is any project activity, the project gets updated with the current timestamp.
Each night (midnight), a PHP file is executed (likely through a cron job) that scans through the project database to identify which projects had activity that day. For projects with activity, the project owner name is selected and the user table is scanned to check if the user wishes to receive a daily email notification. If yes, add to a recipient list; else, ignore.
Questions / concerns I have that would appreciate some guidance on before I start to implement:
I'm in a shared hosting environment. What precautions do I need to take from being misidentified as spam either by the hosting company or the receiving mail servers?
Do I need to "chunk" out the recipient list (50 emails at a time) and email each group? Is this as simple as putting a sleep(30); between each call to mail()?
I'm using the CodeIgniter framework and will have the cron job call the appropriate function in a controller to run this at midnight. How do I limit calls from only the cron job to prevent some unauthorized user from calling this function from the browser?
Thanks.
If you do change the "From" header in php, make sure you change it to the domain that's hosted on that server. It looks suspicious when mail #a.com is being sent by b.com's servers.
I would send the emails individually foreach ($Users as $User)..., since this allows you to personalize the email contents. Even if you don't need to personalize emails now, you might want to later, and the support for it will already be there when you need it.
First, I would store the script outside of the web root. I'm not sure if CodeIgniter will let you do this, but there is no need for the script to ever be served by Apache. Cron doesn't care where the script is stored. Additionally, I've checked the time when the script is executed. If it's not midnight, then don't blast out the emails. Also, you could keep a log around and also check to make sure the emails haven't already been sent that day before sending.
1) Start with an SPF record and a DKIM if you can that lets mail servers know to expect email from your servers
2) First, you need to put the recipients in the BCC field so that it not each user has the email addresses of 49 other users on your system. One step further is to do each email separately, putting only the recipient in the TO field. This approach also allows your to tailor each email to the user (perhaps putting in "Hi [First name]".
3) Have the cron job something like this
wget http://localhost/send-emails
Then in your script, check $_SERVER and make sure you only allow requests from 127.0.0.1
About the third question: You can either use an .htaccess file to prevent access to that specific page or you can call your script in cron with a command line parameter and check for that variable in $argv.
1) The SPF record is the most important thing. Use the email from the domain so whatever#whatever.com, where whatever.com has the SPF records set correctly.
2) It's always good to throttle email, especially when first starting out. You should check your shared servers policies, which are normally 200-500/hour. Calculate how many seconds that comes to. For example 300/hour is 1 every 12 seconds. After a few weeks of sending good emails, you should be ok to send larger amounts.
3) You can have the cron file outside the webroot or limit access via .htaccess or another method.
Related
I am trying to set up a system where a user enters some information in a form and an email will be constructed where the information is saved into mysql.
I am trying to figure out how to make it so the email will be sent, for example, 20 minutes after the user makes their input. (Without the user staying on the browser).
I need this delay as I need the ability for an admin to log on to a page to look at the email and possibly edit it before it sends.
Is this possible through a cron job. Am I able to set one up that automatically checks sql table for an update and then sends the email after a certain time?
Or is it possible to delay a php script with the sleep function and then send the email. Can I make the PHP script still run when user has closed site and left?
you can use mySQL to store the data sent by the user. this data will be accessed later using another script triggered by a cron Job: if you have the ability to set cron jobs in the control panel or via access to the server, go ahead, use cron tab syntax to define when the job will be triggered, this website may help you:
https://crontab-generator.org/
another approach is to use external service to trigger an event every interval, the event could be accessing the cron job script via HTTP.
if you want your email to be sent exactly after 20 mins, please add a field to your mysql table indicating the desired send date(beware of timezones).
you may also want to add a flag indicating if the email is sent, so you do not send the same email twice.
You can't (easily) have a PHP script stay alive that long.
Your best strategy, IMO, would be to have the PHP script create the email file, and notify the human.
Then you can have PHP run a shell script which uses the "at" program to schedule a task to happen in 20 minutes. At is a cousin of cron, but is better suited for this job.
That scheduled task will be to take the e-mail message, move it some place else (like a "done" directory), and pipe it through your mailer. tip: /usr/sbin/sendmail -t < myEmailFile will work on most Linux boxen.
This is some type of funny question to ask here.
Well, I am using WordPress with registration. When a user signup. Wordpress send email containing user name and password to login.
I simply want that email to receive after delay of 10 minutes. Is there is something to do with server config OR with WP.
Any clues?
You would have to have multiple things to have it work, you will need to have access to cron in order to delay the job and you need to be able have enough knowledge to edit WordPress to stop the function from sending the email. If you can schedule the job to run a command with the parameters for the email in it 10 minutes later the rest should run on its own.
I am trying to work out how to do something. It must be possible - I've seen something similar done in multiple systems (Twitter, facebook etc.)
The basic thing I want to do is - someone leaves a comment on my website. The comment goes to my email, as well as to my MySql database. I then reply directly on my email. The reply is saved to the database, and auto-approves the user's comment.
I can't work out how to speak to my MySql / PHP system directly from an email. Also - I can't work out how to set up the inboxes?
I am guessing that I'd need to set up mailserver rules so that emails sent to xxxx-response#mydomain.com are actually redirected to a php script, where xxxx is an identifier of the original comment?
Thanks for any light that you can shed...
Assuming you're on a unix system, you could set up an account for receiving the mail, e.g. "fred", and use a .forward in fred's home directory to pipe emails to your php script. e.g.
.forward:
|"/usr/bin/php /path/to/your/script.php"
which will invoke your script anytime an email arrives in fred's mailbox.
You can't 'talk to mysql from an email'. An email is a passive piece of text, nothing that can take actions.
The solution is based on something like this:
You have an email account and poll that accounts Inbox by a php script in a periodical manner, by using wget or similar in combinition with a crontab entry. You can also create an event driven approach, but that is more complex and does not really offer advantages. For all messages found inside that inbox you check if it matches any previous entry in the database. You can do that since you have access to the messages headers and body (the text) by php. That is all you need. Typically the connection between two messages is done by evaluating the 'In-reply-to' header that is set by email programs when you press the reply button. It is like a reference.
The access to the accounts inbox is done by standard mail access protocols, typically pop3 or better imap4. When the mail server is not on the same system then abviously you want to add ssl encryption too. php's imap extension is a very good start for implementing such a client, it supports several protocols.
I am currently working on a registration based website, and I have the server sending an activation email to the user upon registration. This is all done in PHP so, as you can imagine, I am using the mail() function.
This is all fine and dandy, once the user gets the email and clicks the activation link, the 'active' field that is in the 'Users' table is set to true. Here's the problem though, in the case that a user does not confirm their email address, what am I to do?
I have thought of holding details like the date and time the user registers but I don't know how to proceed with this data. How do I have the server automatically delete the user from the database after a set amount of time?
That's what I think I should be asking, but in all honesty I don't know the usual protocol...
Conclusion: Since Cron is for Unix based servers I've had to pass on it, but I found it very interesting that I could just use the Windows Task Scheduler that is built into Windows. This at least means I can test it on my PC before any server hosting. Thank you all
You should definitely store the date and time that the activation link was sent.
There isn't really a way to tell the server to automatically delete stale user data, but it's easy enough to code up yourself. Assuming you have access to cron on your server, you can set up a cronjob to run (for example) every night at 2am and execute a PHP script that searches the database for users who were sent a link more than X days ago but never confirmed it
i think the solution would be Storing the timestamp while sending the mail.
now run a cron every 15minutes which would check that which values are having timestamp more than 24hrs or any timelimit you want and then delete it from db
Just call in your index.php file the following code. (Why index.php ? - because it is requested every time and can "act" as a cronjob.)
(Just Pseudo Code - might need some tweaks!)
mysql_query("DELETE FROM user WHERE active = 'false' AND registerTime < (NOW-60*60*24*7)")
This will delete all Users which have not been activated within 7 Days.
It's just a concept idea i think you can build on.
You should look into cronjobs that you run daily. Simply put in a field in your database with the time your user registered.
I have two file 'mail.php' and 'cron.php' . 'mail.php' receives email address from a source continuously . 'cron.php' will send email to those address at the next hour of receiving hour .If email address is received at 5.45 email will be sent at 6.00 .
My idea is to run cron.php every hour which will get email addresses and their receiving time form session variable.
But how can I synchronise this two file ?? Is it possible to access session variable simultaneously by this two file ?? that means mail.php will write data and after sending mail cron.php will delete those data from session.
Thanks in advance.
You'd have to post some code up. I dont really understand what you mean. The first part of your weustion leads me too believe that you have something setup already, whereas the latter half doesn't.
Basically what you need to do, is have mail.php (the one that gets the email addresses from wherever there coming) and store those somewhere (database or plain text file maybe). Then every hour, run the cron, grab the emails, do whatever you need to do then either elete thos eemails, archive them in another place if you need to keep them, or if your using a database you could use an "email_sent" column and set it to 1 once the emails have been sent.
Answer about session and CRON here.
can php cron jobs access session variables/cookies?
If I were you I'll save the email addresses in database or a text file.
And then delete them after executed.
Can't you just make a function for sending emails (turn mail.php into a function?) and call it with cron.php?