Re: How to implement mass emailing?

Hello, On 10/12/2004 08:42 PM, Marco Tabini wrote:

On 10/07/2004 09:24 AM, Marco Tabini wrote:

Finally, you will need a fast mailing mechanism. mail() is not your only option--you can interface directly with any mailer through SMTP or pipes, for example--but in my experience, you don't need to go any further to make things work properly. What you really need, is a fast

This is a common misconception. It seems that most people confuse queueing with deliverying.

Not that I want to start a fight or anything... but where is the misconception? I simply illustrated several possibilities--one of which is queuing, while the other is deliverying directly (and there is a difference, and they can both be performed through PHP, although I personally wouldn't see the point of bothering with direct delivery).

The misconception is in assuming that when you relay a message to an SMTP server that is the deliverying the message. Relaying a message to another server is usually the same as queueing, except that it is much slower as it make the message go through a TCP (SMTP) connection. The real delivery only happens afterwards, it may take hours, days or even never happen due to permanent failures. Although other MTA work a little different, you may want to review the Qmail big picture to understand better the difference between local queueing and SMTP queueing, and message queueing and message delivery. http://www.nrg4u.com/qmail/the-big-qmail-picture-103-p1.gif The bottom line is, do not use SMTP for queueing unless you do not have an alternative for queueing message, like for instance when you are really obligated to relay messages to a given mail server and this server is in a separate machine from the one where your PHP applications are running. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/ PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/ Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html