* Mattias Thorslund <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I'm trying to set up a list manager on a hosted site. PHPlist > (phplist.com) seemed promising but I read on their forums that it takes > some users hours and hours to send a couple thousand emails. Without > terminal access, I suspect the PHP sending page will time out long > before most of my emails have been sent.
You're comparing apples to oranges here. The amount of time it takes to send the mails isn't based on PHPList but on: 1) The MTA being used to send the mails and 1a) how that MTA is configured 2) Available bandwidth To give an example, where I work, we have a bulk mailer we've developed. The management interface is PHP, but mails are sent via a perl application. The perl application sends the mails via Postfix. Now, selecting the addresses to mail and sending the mails from the perl process takes very little time; it can do that in minutes per tens of thousands. If we didn't limit Postfix, it can send around 100,000 mails in 1.5 - 3 hours -- but that takes up several T1s, and the *available* bandwidth is only 1.5 T1s -- which pushes it to around 4-5 hours (Point 2, above). However, if we consistently use 1.5 T1s, that puts us into a different price bracket at our ISP... so we limit Postfix to a certain number of simultaneous processes... and now that same 100,000 mails takes 10 hours (Point 1a, above). Now, these are examples with Postfix; those numbers might be different using Sendmail (which can be similarly optimized) or Exim (which tends to optimize for lower volumes of mail), etc. (Point 1, above.) So, you can see, the mailer is less dependent on the frontend (PHPlist, to use your example) than on the underlying server architecture. > Does anyone have suggestions for a quicker mailer? I'd like to be able > to import users in bulk, and I'd like to let users sign up and > unsubscribe automatically. PHPlist does all that but... I don't want to > set it all up and then find out I can't send my newsletter. It's > supposed to be an announcement-only list, BTW. If you can, I'd suggest something where the mails are sent by a cronjob or a listener daemon of some sort -- this way, you don't have to wait for the process to finish on your browser, and you won't have to worry about how long any given mailing is taking. I don't know of any packages to recommend -- as I said, the system I work with we home-brewed (and it's not publicly available). -- Matthew Weier O'Phinney | mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Webmaster and IT Specialist | http://www.garden.org National Gardening Association | http://www.kidsgardening.com 802-863-5251 x156 | http://nationalgardenmonth.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
