Check the archives... mail() tends to "break" pretty quickly... sometimes on less than 100 personalised emails... The issue ISN'T mail() itself, but things like server timeouts, script timeouts, etc etc. The issue also isn't really HTML mail, but more the fact that each email has to be sent to the mail que, and this is a slow-ish process, so the script timesout.
So another option is Bcc'ing the email to everyone in a non-personalised manner... you can squeeze a lot more emails out of mail() before the script times out, but you will run into other issues like: a) Bcc'd mails of more than 100 recipients can't be sent on most shared hosts, because it looks like spam -- check with your ISP b) some mail programs and servers treat mass Bcc emails as spam, I hear At the moment, I've only got mailing lists that deals with 50-300 people, so I'm just Bcc'ing them in batches of 20 people... a trade off between lots of emails to timeout the script, and lots of people in the Bcc list. I think for 6000 though, you will really need to look at a class like Manuel's at PHPclasses.org (I think called mimeMail) which has various work-arounds, none of which I've tried. Cheers, Justin on 02/01/03 9:46 AM, Monty ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Happy New Year everyone! > > Is the PHP mail() command robust enough to use in a little mailing list app? > The app will basically send an HTML or Text e-mail to the member database of > about 6,000 people. I'm using RedHat Linux 7.2 with PHP 4.2.2, by the way. > I'm concerned I'll bog down my server if I issue the mail() command 6,000 > times on our server, but, maybe it won't be a problem? > > Also, although I'm sending HTML e-mail, I'm not including attachments or > inline graphics (only direct hotlinks to graphics on a web server). Will > mail() still work okay for this, or do I need to use one of the various PHP > e-mail classes available to send HTML e-mail? > > Any recommendations for online tutorials about building a mailing list > manager using PHP would be much appreciated! > > Thanks! > > Monty > > > > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
