i have an application on my site where people can sign up to receive newsletters, and then someone in a paid group can write and send one immediately to everybody who signed up...
...meaning that i need an efficient way to loop through my database of subscribers and mail them copies of the email using php.
clearly, there is the mail() function....i could put that in a loop...is there a better way?
PEAR's mail queue?
The Mail_Queue class puts mails in a
temporary container, waiting to be fed
to the MTA (Mail Transport Agent), and
sends them later (e.g. a certain
amount of mails every few minutes) by
crontab or in other way.
You could use the BCC header option and send one email with a Blind Carbon Copy list of all the subscribers.
So build the BCC string in the loop and send one email using mail()
Snippet from the PHP manual...
// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
// Additional headers
$headers .= 'To: Mary <mary#example.com>, Kelly <kelly#example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: Birthday Reminder <birthday#example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: birthdayarchive#example.com' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Bcc: birthdaycheck#example.com' . "\r\n";
// Mail it
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
Replace 'Bcc: birthdaycheck#example.com' with $mySubscribersList
I'd suggest finding a way to loop through, and remembering who you mailed already, because if it becomes a large list of people, you script might end and you'd have to reload it.
I have done it once using AJAX, gave me a great way to track where I was in the sending proces. Counted how many people to mail, put the id's in an array, had javascript loop and make seperate calls to a php-mail-page...
-edit-
You can have a script in php, with a simple while loop, but then you should add a check in the DB to see if a mail was already sent to one person. If the script exceeds memory usage, just reload the page, and it will only sent to the ones that haven't received it yet...
Following on #paulbm's answer, why not create an alias on your server that points to all current email addresses? A short procmail script can prevent anyone other than one authorized sender using the alias.
It'd make mailing's easy, and rebuilding the list with new/changed email address would be pretty simple, too.
Try phplist (Homepage) if you need a full featured newsletter and mailinglist manager
Related
I wrote a PHP script to send emails.
My script is like this:
$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: abc#yahoo.com' . "\r\n";
// Email Variables
$toUser = "someone#yahoo.com"; // recipient
$subject = "testing"; // subject
$body = "<html><body><p>
Example of including an image via html \<img\> tag:
<br>
<img src='../images/profile.jpg'>
<br>
My new picture
<br></p></body></html>"; // content
if (mail($toUser,$subject,$body,$headers)) {
echo "sent";
} else {
echo "failed";
}
Well, of course I use a valid email address for sender and receiver. I did receive the email, but it goes to junk mail. So I went for google research. Is it because of my "header" script problem? If it isn't, then what could cause my script to send a junk mail? Any solution?
Please try this:
$headers ="From:<$from>\n";
$headers.="MIME-Version: 1.0\n";
$headers.="Content-type: text/html; charset=iso 8859-1";
mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers,"-f$from");
Perhaps the problem is that yahoo uses domainkeys verification, which will likely fail for your application given that the mail is not actually coming from yahoo's servers.
When I've once had a similar problem I looked at the headers and found out that my host uses SpamAssassin. So I googled for 'SpamAssassin score' and found a multitude of information on how to incorrectly (and thus correctly) form an email.
For example: SpamAssassin score list
1. Check mail content
As others have hinted it is probably marked as spam because your mail looks like spam.
I am not sure if you the script that you have posted is the actual one that you are testing.
If it has the actual mail body & headers, then running this message through a standard installation of SpamAssassin gives it a spam score of 4.9
X-Spam-Status: No, score=4.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_50,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_04,
HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_HTML_ONLY,NO_DNS_FOR_FROM,NO_RELAYS autolearn=no
version=3.2.5
Since the email body has only HTML it has a greater chance of being handled with suspect by most anti-spam solutions.
2. Mail server's IP
Another aspect worth checking will be the IP address of your mail server. Any mail originating from dynamic IP addresses will potentially be considered as SPAM.
3. Blocklists
Also check if your IP address is listed in one of the block lists. To start with please check your IP address with http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup.lasso.
Use mxtoolbox.com to check the servers IP to be blacklisted or not. As well this website can help you with a couple of email related checks.
Of course there are a long list of checks running inside spam filters. As already suggested, check the email headers for details about the spam filters rating of the spam email.
Hope that helps!
**This Works Perfectly fine for me**
$to="reciever#reciever.com";
$subject="This is Your Message";
$from = 'Sender <noreply#sender.com>';
$body='Hi '.$name.', <br/><br>Now You can See Yor main in inbox';
$headers = "From: " .($from) . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: ".($from) . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Return-Path: ".($from) . "\r\n";;
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Priority: 3\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP". phpversion() ."\r\n";
mail($to,$subject,$body,$headers);
I was having the same problem:
The problem is that when you specify content-type before the "From:" part , the mail comes as a spam.
But if you specify "From:" before the content part it comes as a normal mail and makes you smile and curious.
As schnalle said, one problem surely is that the smtp server that you use to send the email and the one thet you specify as From, is different.. the from's domain whould be the same that the server youre running on.
So, you can use the yahoo server to send the email (check if they allow the smtp remote connection, but i guess they do) connecting by smtp, and this will solve 1 problem.
Another one is the html contents without the alternative plain text contents, but, this one is less important.
I suggest you phpMailer, free and open-source php class to send email, easly to use (i use it event o send mail through gmail server)
On your server try to sort your SPF (Sender Policy Framework, Google for SPF record) record out.
Make sure you send your e-mails from an existing account on your server/domain.
Make sure you have the reply-to address in your header.
These are the basic things you can try.
if your website domain is mydomain.com then in From headers make sure to use someone#mydomain.com
Remove the Content-type: text/html and add $headers .= "X-Priority: 2\nX-MSmail-Priority: high"; to get rid of Spam. This method has been tried and tested.
the problem is, the server you're sending the mail from is not a yahoo server. most spam filters check if they match, otherwise it would (and is - or was) possible to easily fake the sender. ever wondered why you get spam from bill.gates AT microsoft.com or your own mail address?
You've got two solutions:
use Yahoo's SMTP using abc#yahoo.com credentials to send mail from abc#yahoo.com;
use other from, with your own domain;
You can try the mail class and test file that I have created here. I have tested the files and can send emails to my hotmail and gmail under a different mail name. The main reason why the emails are mark as junk is because the structure (both header and message) is not correctly done. In most cases, it is the line feed that is causing the problem.
I can use it to send mail with attachments to Gmail. However, the attachments dont work for hotmail. Hope this helps =)
You can check the files here..
If I send an email through GMail to this address nkhkhlkhlkjlkjkljlkjlk#gmail.com
I got error like:
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently
My question is, if I send using the PHP mail function, how can I catch bounce emails?
My code:
// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
// Additional headers
$headers .= 'To: Mary <mary#example.com>, Kelly <kelly#example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: Birthday Reminder <birthday#example.com>' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Cc: birthdayarchive#example.com' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Bcc: birthdaycheck#example.com' . "\r\n";
$to = "nkhkhlkhlkjlkjkljlkjlk#gmail.com";
$subject = "Testing";
$message = "Testing body";
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
You can't detect such errors just by using mail(). You have to specify a valid return address and then connect to that mailbox (via IMAP or POP, there are functions for that) and check if any message bounced. Bear in mind that bounces may take a long time (even hours, due to transient errors) so you have to do this check asynchronously.
you could get the message by mail when you use this:
$bounce = 'test#domian.com';
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers,"-f $bounce");
This will send all bounce back mails to your address
You could use PEAR MAil, it contains a parseAddressList() method which checks if the server of an email address accepts the email address. It also returns useful error messages.
The PHP mail() function does have an error status as the function return value, but it won't pick up this kind of error because it only checks that the email has been sent, not that it has been received.
(this is because it needs to return control back to the program immediately; it can't wait for a possible bounce message because they can take a long time to come back - you wouldn't want your program to sit and wait for five days just in case the email bounced, would you?)
Therefore, the only way to determine whether a message has bounced is to have a separate program which checks the mailbox which the bounces would be sent to.
You can specify the mailbox for bounces using the -f option in the mail options string (see the PHP mail() function man page for more info on this).
Then have a separate program periodically check that mailbox for bounce messages, and report them to you as required. (there are a number of PHP libraries that allow you to check a mailbox; Google will help here, or look in PEAR)
Determining which email it was will depend on the quality of the bounce message. You should definitely be able to see the intended recipient's email address, but you may not be able to tell which email it was, ie to match it up to a specific instance of when you called the mail() function in the first place.
Hope that helps.
You should login via IMAP or POP3 to your inbox and parse the email address and delivery error.
It's also worth mentioning that you can specify (while sending) custom headers to better track the message source, I believe MailChimp and others do this do track campaigns, etc...
PHP does not know anything about the mail after it got out of the mail function, so no way to do it at the same time as you send the mail.
I've never done html e-mail before, I've just set up php mail using http://www.postmarkapp.com
I was wondering how I would go about sending php mail as html?
Does anybody have any previews of a php page sending html e-mail I can look at to get the jist of how it works?
Currently I'm just putting text into a variable and sending it as a message, how is it done for html?
Regards
Do you still want to use Postmark to send emails?
In Postmark, you set the TextBody property to the text version of your message, and the HtmlBody property to the html version of it. It is good practice to always include both. Depending on whether your user's email client supports HTML or not, the appropriate message form is rendered. Read more on this here.
Edit: Added an example. I generally like splitting my string into separate lines so that I can indent it nicely like a real HTML file. Of course, if you used templates, that would make it so much better.
$htmlBody = "
<html>
<body>
Thank you for using our app!<br />
- Super Awesome App Team
</body>
</html>
";
http://phpmailer.worxware.com/
This is the best class I've found to send mail with PHP. It allows HTML formatting with alternate plain text part, as well as attachments. It also seems to filter out spam quite well when used for online forms.
Put the html code inside the variable where you need as you are doing while creating web pages and set the mail header to text/html.
$headers.= 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers.= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$headers.= "From: eaxfd#gmail.com \r\n";
$headers.= "Reply-To: eaxfd#gmail.com \r\n";
mail($to,$subject,$message,$headers);
You just have to include html headers in your call to the mail() function:
$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1';
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
I have a website in which I send a confirmation mail as part of the registration process.
Some time ago, I had some troubles with the mails I sent since I used no headers (PHP mail function).
Once I put some headers, I've gotten more responses from users, but I suspect that not every message reaches its destination.
How can I be sure that the messages reach their destination?
Which are the headers that can be considered a 'must'?
This is the code of my SendMail function
mail($to,
$subject,
$message,
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n".
"Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowder\n".
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n".
"Message-Id: <" . md5(uniqid(microtime())) . "#mysite.com>\n".
"Return-Path: <admin#mysite.com>\n".
"X-Mailer: PHP v".phpversion()."\n".
"From: admin# mysite.com");
You should use external library for working with e-mails in php like PhpMailer , SwiftMailer or Zend_Mail. All your problems will go away.
The headers need a white space at the bottom to separate the header from main body.
Tools like Spam Assassin will give you a big mark down for that.
Also you should use \r\n as a line terminator instead of just \n
From PHP.net
Multiple extra headers should be separated with a CRLF (\r\n).
The headers seems quite good to me. The only glitch I see is an extra whitespace in the From header.
I'm sure you already checked it, but just in case ...
"From: admin# mysite.com");
should be (?)
"From: admin#mysite.com");
This is a working mail function I'm using for html mail and variable $return is defined to get error report from mail server in case of fail delivery.
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" . "\r\n";
$headers .= 'From: <'.$from.'>' . "\r\n";
$return = '-f'.$from;
#mail($to, $subject, $msg, $headers, $return);
you can see more detail at here sugunan.com
The headers look ok, except for the details pointed by #Eineki. Also if you are using Windows you need to send the $to param in the form "user#mail.com" and not "Username ", because it may cause trouble, due to the way the mail() function is implemented on windows platform, the "to" address may be parsed incorrectly.
You should add a Date: header (its mandatory by RFC5322) and some mail-clients may assume January 1 1970 as an e-mail date if none is given (and it gets lost between all the other old messages).
I am trying to send an email from a site I am building, but it ends up in the yahoo spam folder. It is the email that sends credentials. What can I do to legitimize it?
$header = "From: site <sales#site.com>\r\n";
$header .= "To: $name <$email>\r\n";
$header .= "Subject: $subject\r\n";
$header .= "Reply-To: site <sales#site.com>" . "\r\n";
$header .= "MIME-VERSION: 1.0\r\n";
$header .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$phpversion = phpversion();
$header .= "X-Mailer: PHP v$phpversion\r\n";
mail($email,$subject,$body,$header);
Don't use HTML in your email.
Send it via a legitimate mail server with a static IP and reverse-DNS (PTR) that points to the machine's real host name (and matches a forward lookup).
Include a Message-ID (or ensure that the local mailer adds one for you).
Run your email through SpamAssassin and see which bad-scoring rules it matches. Avoid matching them.
Use DomainKeys Identified Mail to digitally sign your messages.
I just successfully tried the following from my Yahoo! Web Hosting account:
$email = "me#site.com";
$subject = "Simple test";
$body = "Simple test";
$header = "From: site \r\n";
$header .= "To: $name \r\n";
$header .= "Subject: $subject\r\n";
$header .= "Reply-To: site " . "\r\n";
$header .= "MIME-VERSION: 1.0\r\n";
$header .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$phpversion = phpversion();
$header .= "X-Mailer: PHP v$phpversion\r\n";
mail($email,$subject,$body,$header);
However, you have some duplication in your header you should only need to do the following:
$email = "me#site.com";
$subject = "Simple test";
$body = "Simple test";
$header = "From: site \r\n";
$header .= "MIME-VERSION: 1.0\r\n";
$header .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
$phpversion = phpversion();
$header .= "X-Mailer: PHP v$phpversion\r\n";
mail($email,$subject,$body,$header);
In addition to Ted Percival's suggestions, you could try using PHPMailer to create the emails for you rather than manually building the headers. I've used this class extensively and not had any trouble with email being rejected as spam by Yahoo, or anyone else.
There is also the possibility that 'sendmail' (which is underneath the PHP mail() function) needs extra parameters. If you have a problem with return headers (such as Return-Path) not being set with what you set them to be, you may need to use the fifth mail() parameter. Example:
mail('recipient#domain.com', 'Subject', $mail_body, $headers, " -f sender#domain.com");
There is some further evidence that true vanilla sendmail may have problem with this! Hopefully you have 'postfix' as PHP's underlying mail() support on your target server.
In addition to Ted Percival's suggestions, make sure that the IP address the email is coming from is a legitimate source for email according to the SPF record of site.com. If site.com doesn't have an SPF record, adding one (which allows the IP address in question, of course) may help get the emails past spam filters.
And if absolutely do need to use HTML in your email, make sure that you also include a plain text version as well; you'd use the content type of "multipart/alternative" instead of "text/html".
Ted's suggestions are good, as are Tim's, but the only way I've ever been able to reliably get email through to Yahoo/Hotmail/etc is to use the PEAR email classes. Try those & (assuming your server is OK) I can pretty much guarantee it'll work.
Ted and Tim have excellent suggestions. As does Shabbyrobe. We use PHPMailer and don't have any problems with spam filters.
One thing to note is that many spam filters will count NOT having a text version against you if you are using a MIME format. You could add all of the headers and the text version yourself, or just let PHPMailer or the PEAR mail library take care of that for you. Having a text version may or may not help, but it is good practice and user friendly.
I realize that your code sample is just that - a sample, but it is worth saying: Do not ever just drop user provided data into your mail headers. Make sure you validate that it is data you expect. It is trivial to turn a php mail script into an open relay, and nobody wants that.
Check rfc 822 and rfc 2045 for email format. I find python's Email class really easy to work with. I assume php's PEAR does the same (according to earlier mails). Also the header and the body are separated by a "\r\n\r\n", not sure if your code automatically inserts that, but you can try appending that to the header.
I dont think that DK/SPF might be necessary (since there are lots of webservers out there without DK/SPF support). There can be alot of factors that might be causing it to get blocked(atleast 10K different criterions and methods.. p0f,greylisting,greylisting, blacklisting etc etc). Make sure that your email is properly formatted(this makes a BIG difference). Look into libraries that generate the complete header for you.. that way you have least chances of making any mistake.
Adding a SPF record is very easy. You should try.
This one is for dreamhost plus googlemail
You should also ad you webserver ip address (in my case, the line before googlemail)
The last line tells the server to do a soft reject (mark as spam but don't delete) I'm using it instead of "-" (delete) because google documentation says so :-)
It's a TXT record
v=spf1
ip4:64.111.100.0/24 ip4:66.33.201.0/24 ip4:66.33.216.0/24
ip4:208.97.132.0/24 ip4:208.97.187.0/24 ip4:208.113.200.0/24 ip4:208.113.244.0/24
ip4:208.97.132.74 ip4:67.205.36.71
include:aspmx.googlemail.com
mx ~all
Hope it helps