Re: Effecient mass mailings

) On Feb 4, 2008, at 11:22 AM, Robert Fitzpatrick wrote:

I a currently re-writing a web app from ASP to PHP and have come to the part where the app sends mass mailings to their customer base. This has always been problematic for them with the existing setup and I am looking for the best approach. While I've setup mailings with PHP, never such mass mailings. They will be using a web form to send sometimes 2-5MB attachments to thousands of customers to advertise new products with PDF's, etc. Using their Windows IIS SMTP virtual server smarthost function, I send their mail off-site to our postfix mail gateway, but it still bogs down and I'm sure a remote server is not the answer, but still better than the errors they receive trying to use localhost and IIS. Once the re-write, the app will be on to a Linux box where I can do some tweaking to these and hope localhost will work better for these mailings. Can someone give some pointers at how I may want to approach such mass mailings? Thanks in advance!

It's not a complete PHP solution... BUT... why not pass it off to something written specifically to handle mass emails? something like mailman? Is it that they want the addresses in 1 place and 1 place only so they don't have to reenter the addresses? If so, I'm pretty sure mailman can read flat files for addresses, so just have your app export the appropriate records to a flat file say... 1 address per line (Or how ever mailman would handle it) replace the old file, and then simply send out the email? Or have I just shown my ignorance again? I've been told I'm very good at that! : -- Jason Pruim Raoset Inc. Technology Manager MQC Specialist 3251 132nd ave Holland, MI, 49424 www.raoset.com japruim@raoset.com