An upcoming project I'm working and spec'ing out is a mass mailing application. Initially, I was looking at Mailman which was written in Python since it looks like it handles delivering emails efficiently without killing the server. We have 1 client able to send 110,000 emails at 6.5K avg per week on PIII 800 with 128 MB RAM using Mailman. The inteface however is very bad and we'd like to develop other features like text ads, tracking, templates, etc. This would require writing a wrapper around Mailman in PHP. I was considering of writing the mass mailing application in PHP instead though.
If anyone has eperience writing such applications with this amount of emails, I'd like to know what you've done. I'm thinking of coding the front end in PHP that will put the email into a queue table that will force a command line PHP script listening on a particular port to scan the database for this new task in queue. Once it picks up the task, the timeout for this application to run will be set to infinite. It'll establish a SMTP socket either to a really beefed up mailing list server or the localhost SMTP server to begin blasting out these emails. >From what I understand, it's better to blast emails via an open socket connection to SMTP rather than looping through Sendmail. Is this the right thing todo? I've also heard that PHP is not good for writing mailing lists application, but Mailman is written in Python and it's able to send thousands of email just fine. Any thoughts on this? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
