Sending LOTS of Email via PHP / Timeout Question(s)
- From: Good Man <heyho@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 11:33:36 -0500
Hi There
I'm developing a fairly large site for a company that lists jobs
available in US states and Canadian provinces. It's a members-only site
(you have to sign up to get the job listings), and its also pretty
specialized (they only really concern themselves with one 'type' of
employment).
At launch, the site will have appox. 4200 members, with the goal of
increasing membership over time....
Here are my questions/concerns:
In addition to being a full-fledged, login/password database site, the
site will be sending a LOT of emails. Every morning, ALL members of the
database will receive a listing of available jobs in the country (so, at
least 4200 emails right there). Plus, when a new job is added to a state
by an admin (say, "Florida"), members who have requested to be notified
about Florida jobs will get an email saying "A job has just been listed
in Florida. Log in to the site for details."
My plan of action so far is:
a) hit the database with a query and pull all the recipients into an
array (memberID, name, email address, email "unsubscribe" code), thereby
getting my database interaction done with in one query
b) use Manuel Lemos' excellent MIME/E-mail sending class (phpclasses.org)
for delivering the emails (it has been just amazing for all other
websites i've used it with)
My concern is that I will experience timeouts/connection losses during
the sending of these emails, as has been happening now with some other
sites of mine that attempt to accomplish the above on a smaller scale.
This site will be hosted on its OWN SERVER (dedicated server through
Rackspace) so I will be able to have full control over PHP and Apache
timeout values....
Questions:
a) if the plan of my attack is listed as above, will I encounter
timeouts? Do you think they would be Apache timeouts, or PHP timeouts?
What are good settings to use? It does take a second or so to send an
email....
b) how can I 'test' my setup without sending real emails to real members?
I have no problem putting my email address in each 'member account' for
testing, but will my ISP deliver the 4200 emails to me, or be programmed
to say 'wow, 4200 emails FROM one address TO one address! must be
spam!' and ban my test server?
c) should i plan for this breaking? ie: should i make a textfile ("apr-
05-2005.txt") that writes the memberID to a new line with each email php
sends, so that I can resume sending emails and ensure that members who
have been sent the email don't get sent it again? i would love to avoid
this - it means that I will have to return to the project every day and
'resume' sending emails.
d) can I use a cron-job to send these emails via PHP? if so, does that
influence the timeout factor?
These are 'serious' clients, they really won't like to face email
delivery issues when the site is launched, and I need to deliver
something that works well regarding the email system.... does anyone have
any tips????
Needless to say, this entire site is not related to SPAM at all, and as
you can see in my description, every member gets an "unsubscribe" code to
click on so they can opt-out of emailings.
Thanks,
GM
.
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