I want to send mail to hundreds of email addresses in PHP using php mail function.
How can I do that?
You can also use SwiftMailer
Please also look at a similar post here
You can try phplist
It will be a better option
I wouldn't try writing your own bulk mailer, unless you have a lot of time. There is allot of issues to cover including throttling emails, sending emails out into small batches so AOL and other service providers don't consider your server as SPAMMING people. Also you want to probably include tracking for opened emails, track bounced emails, clicked links, etc.
I would look at some open source options such as www.phplist.com which is a very good open source program for doing bulk emails.
Or on the commercial side take a look at Interspire Email Markerer, it's a very slick product and well worth the money, plus you can host it on your own servers.
www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/
You must use PHP? If so, I'd use PHPMailer, I have a bit of experience with it and it hasn't failed me for bulk email sending.
Alternatively, if you have access to the server, look at using Postfix or Sendmail, they are better options for that quantity of mail.
If you're sending a lot of mail, you don't want to do it all # once or else you will consume too many resources.
Here is a Tutorial on how to use the Mail_Queue component of the PEAR library: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail-queue.mail-queue.tutorial.php
It basically will incrementally send segments of your email blast without throttling your server.
Use PHPMailer library, it has a lot of functionality. Store the email addresses as an array and using for loop just keep adding each email address as a string to the mail->AddAddress field. It will take care of sending the bulk mail. I have only used this to send bulk mails to 6/7 addresses at a time. It should also work for hundreds of addresses.
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();
?>
Related
I need to send like 4000+ emails but individual emails to each using. Doing a foreach takes forever and the page loads until it finish (What really end up doing is an error).
I need to send those emails the best way possible and just leave the job in the background and return a response while that is happening.
If I didn't explain myself correctly, let me know.
Thanks a lot!
If you are looking for the best way to sending emails, I would highly suggest using a third party service.
There are many email services that guarantees sending your emails accurately to receivers inbox. Emails we send from our own email services provided by hosting providers mostly wind up in receivers spam folder. And also queuing up that much emails is not a solution as it would also bring up the question of what would happen if queue service failed.
I recently worked with a useful service which is named sendgrid. It helped me send that much emails without that much trouble.
You only need to loop though your data to format recipient and email content. Then send that data to sendgrid and they handle the emails.
refer this for more info.
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
So my hosting provider is limiting emails sent out to 2 at a time, which means no array of emails.Right now I'm using Pear to send html emails to multiple users who sign up together.
Is there a solution to loop through the mail() function multiple times ultimately sending out multiple emails? How will the performance be?
The hosting company actually suggested we look for some solution to by pass their restrictions, but i don't know where to look.
Thanks
PEAR's Mail_Queue package comes to mind here.
You could just iterate over the array of email addresses? I assume your use case is more complex than this, but it should get you on the right path:
<?php
foreach ($emails_array as $email)
{
mail($email, ....); //or whatever your mail call is
}
?>
You can use Cron job to setup sending out when the hourly limit hits.
or,
you can use mail chimp or constant contact to do the job for you.
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.