[thelist] Sending e-mails

Tim Burgan email at timburgan.com
Mon Nov 21 06:44:06 CST 2005


Hi Kevin,

>How do people send out those 
>e-mails that say "undisclosed recipients" in the "To" box?
>
Put all the recipients addresses in a 'Bcc' field instead of the 'To' 
field. Although the disadvantage of this is that a huge mass of email 
would be all sent at once, which I assume may make the server unstable.. 
which is why the host doesn't want you to send more than 150 emails an 
hour I assume.

Regarding your other points. I use a program called MailLoop, which we 
actually have installed on our server. It's allows you to do all this 
advanced stuff (such as send mass personalised emails X minutes apart so 
it appears you're writing to the individual as it's ONLY ever their one 
email address in the "to" field) in a pretty simple manner without 
having to tinker with the system. The reason I started using it: my work 
already had it.. so I just had to use it!

I haven't done this.. but you may be able to write a PHP script that 
runs (and the host may allow you to run "cron" jobs) and sends out a 
handful of emails every X minutes or so.

 From what I understand (others may be able to assist more): I'd write a 
PHP script where you input all the email addresses you want to send to, 
the subject, message and so on. Then when you click send, it adds that 
data to a database and doesn't send any email. Then have a second PHP 
file that just sits on the web server that none of your pages link to. 
This PHP script (called by the CRON jobs every X minutes or hours, or 
whatever) connects to the database, sees what emails in the queue to 
send and sends 20. Then the PHP script waits for the CRON job to open it 
again and repeats the process.

I hope this gives you some ideas. This is just what's come to my mind.. 
it by no means may be a good idea as I've never tried it. I'm kinda 
hoping others may be able to comment on this for you.

Cheers
Tim



More information about the thelist mailing list