Best way to do "mass" mailing with a plugin?

Question

I am currently developing a plugin that sends out questions from yesterday to users that have tags of those questions favorited.

In a foreach() I am directly calling:

                qa_send_email(array(
                    'fromemail' => qa_opt('mailing_from_email'),
                    'fromname' => qa_opt('mailing_from_name'),
                    'toemail' => $userinfo['email'],
                    'toname' => $userinfo['handle'],
                    'subject' => $mailsubject,
                    'body' => trim($emailbody),
                    'html' => true,
                ));
 

From q2a core mass mailing I have seen that gidgreen implemented kind of mail buffer which sends out emails step by step (bunch of 100 or so).

Questions:

1. Do I have to do the same buffer mailing?

Currently I have only 150 users in the forum. What if I would have 15000?

2. Can I just stick to qa_send_email() without any concerns?

Would be nice if somebody can give advice for me and the others!

Thank you
Kai

Comments

Hi Kai,
I can not help you with technical tips, however based on my experience mailchimp would work better for you in the following manner
1- It generates lots of helpful reports as to who opened your email, who opted out etc
2- your domain will not be flagged as spam as the emails cumming from mailchimp
3- you dont have to spend time in working on this issue and can focus on more important issues which are keys to attract more visitors to your website

just a suggestion thought to share with you

Answer 1

Check out the Async Email Plugin by sama55 - I believe it's for these sorts of situations. You're best off not sending all the emails synchronously in response to a web page request.

Comments

I consider adding a sleep(); to the foreach that is sending the emails. This way I have some control over it. Plus it feels kind of asynch if 1000 mails are distributed over 10 - 100 seconds ;)

Only question is how long can the script be executed. Imagine thousands of emails.

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The script execution time means this is not a good solution. The user's browser will still be showing progress while the emails are going and if they click 'stop' the emails could stop (depends on browser/network/Apache configuration). The right answer is to do it asynchronously I'm afraid.

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Ah, I did not know that this can happen, i.e. that the browser has the "power" to stop a process on the server. Sounds insecure to me actually.

Anyway, I guess best would be to setup a cronjob to overcome this problem? -- In my case I need to send an individual generated email newsletter one time per day.

The only reason why I would implement sleep() - I was reading somewhere that if you send out 1000 emails at once your mail server is quickly regarded as a spam server. I wanted to avoid this by buffering the mail process.

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With that amount of messages, Id recommend a real email manager.  My provider starts off with 5,000.  But you need to request to do so.  It can be increased with written permission.  The product is called ListMessenger, about $60 USD.  My provider was GoDaddy at the time.  I never had an issue.  Probably because we set it as one-click opt out, and never emailed someone that did not opt in.  Quite simply, never email someone unless they asked for it - this is how we maintained it.

We had over 150,000 members.

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You'd be better off running PHP via the command line in this situation, but that's probably not feasible for most people.