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

[Gareth Anderson]

Thanks for the great help wtih this so far, but I have yet more questions.

> (By the way, broadcast/update/newsletter mailing lists are part of the
> functionality provided by standard mailing list software.)
> 
> Here is my favorite quick-start tutorial on SMTP:
>   http://cr.yp.to/smtp/mail.html
> To try it out, telnet to your mail machine, port 25.

However my aim is to use PHP mail() function to do the mailing.

However I have read "Web-based PHP scripts aren't designed to run for
long periods of time (the default execution time is 30 seconds), and
this presents a problem if you need to send a weekly newsletter to a
large number of recipients."

This is what I'm attempting to do.

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?

Will I hit a timeout when I run my script to send the email out to say
500 people? Although I assume that would be upto the server, is there
a way around this limitation?
Do I need to communicate directly with the SMTP server?

I'm assuming that its more efficient to use htmlMimeMail and use BCC
to send to several people at once rather than sending to each person
one at a time using php's mail function? (is this correct?)

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Gareth