Re: outgoing mail function freezing problem

scott wrote:

My mail function is sending out a few hundred or so mail address but keeps hanging when it gets to sending a mail form a certain domain. Probably DNS. Try doing a "dig thedomain.com" (assuming linux) on the domain it is going to. I suspect there is not an entry thus it will hang until DNS times out.

As the script hangs at this point I can't send anymore mails once the script encounters an address from x domain. What would be the best way to work around this? Why is mail() hanging? In my opinion, if you are sending all the emails from a single PHP script, do one per script (depends upon how the maximum execution time works). Or use cron/at to do it outside of waiting for a web page. I admit that I use perl for this part, calling it from "at".

How would you suggest incorporating a timeout so that the script continues once mail() has not exited for more than say 5 seconds???? mail() is a blocking call, so it won't exit until it has either successfully sent an email or has failed.

HTH Chris