[thelist] throttling a bulk mailing

[Matt Warden]

thelist,

I need to write a script that will send out the results from
essentially a 'saved search' from some defined subset of our user
accounts table. The subset could be rather small or quite large.

I saved URLs from a past thread on the list about sending bulk mail in
PHP. Many people discussed how it needed to be broken up, so as not to
spring off any 'spammer' red flags from upstream providers, etc. What
I don't believe was discussed is exactly how (quantitatively) the
subset should be partitioned. Should I break them into chunks of 100?
10? Is there a certain amount of time I should let go between runs?

Essentially, what I am envisioning is a queue in the database, and a
script that is called by a cron job every x minutes. The script would
then retrieve the oldest y records in the queue and process/send those
emails.

My question, then, is: what values of x and y would be most appropriate?

(Unfortunately, trying to query anything like this in google is a nonstarter.)




-- 
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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