[prog] Mailing list software - how does the emailing work? (mass bcc?)

[Gareth Anderson]

Hi Kathryn,

> You can set the execution time in the php program itself.  I have one
> script that can take several minutes to run (it imports some ugly data).
> Look at the set_time_limit() function.

Ahh thankyou, I may need to do this for sending a large number of emails.

> > I've also read that I could use
> > http://www.phpguru.org/static/htmlMimeMail5.html to send to multiple
> > recipients (although I will be using the PHP4 version)
> >
> > However, is there any recommendations about this?
> 
> It looks like a fairly plain wrapper around mail().

Yes it is, I now see that for my purposes I may be better off just
using plain mail() with the BCC changed to be the way I want it.

> I don't think you'll actually be delivering the messages yourself.
> Instead it will take as long as firing off say 500 sendmails.   You can do
> this one of two ways  1) send it individually to the 500 recipients 2)
> split them into batches.
> 
> Method number one is brain dead simple. #2 is a little more problematic.
> You probably don't want everyone in a batch to see all the other
> recipients in a batch.  I work around that by setting the To address to
> and address that I know will just discard it.  Then I Bcc all the
> addresses in my batch, So if my batch size is 25 emails, it will only take
> 20 calls to mail() to send them.  That should take almost no time.
> 

So the To: address does actually get sent but the recipient discards it?
If thats the easiest way I might do that, more than likely I'll have
the "To" as the name of the mailing list, however is there any way to
make the "To" just look like an address without it being actually
sent? (If its not easy I won't bother).
Just for testing, the mailing lists themselves are not really going to
have addresses....

> > Do I need to communicate directly with the SMTP server?
> 
> Why would you want to when PHP has built in functions to send emails?
> 

Good point :)

> I read the documentation you linked to above and it appears that the class
> mentioned is a wrapper around php's mail (and a couple of other delivery
> methods)

Yes thats all it is.
Also in regard to BCC'ing people, is there a limit at which point it
may be marked as SPAM?
In other words, are there limits on the batch size?
For example, I could just send them all in one giant batch and
everyone would just get BCC'ed a copy of it, but would that make it
appear to be SPAM?

Thankyou for the information Kathryn!

Regards,
Gareth