May be something or nothing... bulk emailing via PHP

[MikeDS]

Hi guys

One of my recent development ideas is to create a PHP based bulk emailer for the company we work for. Currently we have some Macros programmed for Outlook XP by someone who used to work here, but as neither me or my colleagues are versed in VB we can't really maintain the coding that well, and the macros are generally just degrading system performance (plus it's one of the reasons why as a company we can't yet upgrade to Vista or Office 2007).

Anyway, I've run a couple of small tests (i.e. creating templates with execCommand and sending to three external email addresses) and all is working splendidly. However, a lot of our mailing lists are in excess of over 100 people. My main query is, is there likely to be some sort of issue as to sending emails via HTTP rather then SMTP, and is our domain host likely to kick up some kind of fuss?

I'll admit now that this whole domain business isn't quite my forté so apologies if this seems a bit of an ignorant question, but obviously if there's gonna be some sort of detrimental effect on anything I won't really want to put in the necessary time and effort.

Thanks guys!!

[simplistik]

It's not your host you really have to worry about it's other hosts and ISPs that you need to be worried about, not black listing you.

You need to validate your web address for other ISPs you can start by setting up your SPF: http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html

You also need to follow some guidelines to not get flagged, things like keeping your subject lines to a 30 character minimum or something like that (i forget the actual size). Not using specific keywords, etc etc.

[MikeDS]

Aah, I hadn't got round to finalizing and researching the security aspects yet (although I'm sure there are many), but must admit that was something I never knew about, thanks for the tip :)

[littleking84]

Also most hosting companies I have ever used have put limits on how many emails can be sent out with http, usually it's 15 per hour, so in theory you could setup a cron task to run a php script every hour but hosts intentionally make it difficult to make a mass-emailer work because it's their servers that will be blacklisted :S

btw this wysiwyg editor for this forum is really annoying :( maybe it just doens't work with mac 100% tho

[simplistik]

btw this wysiwyg editor for this forum is really annoying :( maybe it just doens't work with mac 100% tho

works on my mac just fine, what browser and what's the issue?

[littleking84]

lol perhaps this is off topic but ok,
I'm on firefox 3
The spell checker doesn't work, the little blinking bar indicating where I will be typing doesn't show, I can only add text to the bottom of the message (and if I try to edit text I already wrote it will put everything in the first character place and I cant go down from there) also I can't add things to my copy buffer from the text area.

This is only for the advanced editor, I now use the quick reply for everything, but then again I do have ad blocker plus so that might be it.

Edit: i turn off addblocker and it still is having issues, oh well I'm over it, I use the quick edit and have learned enough bbcode to get by

[poisa]

lol perhaps this is off topic but ok,
I'm on firefox 3
The spell checker doesn't work, the little blinking bar indicating where I will be typing doesn't show, I can only add text to the bottom of the message (and if I try to edit text I already wrote it will put everything in the first character place and I cant go down from there) also I can't add things to my copy buffer from the text area.

littlelink84, I'm having the same problem in XP using FF3. In Explorer 7 it works fine.

MikeDS,

I had to build a few mass mailers over the years, and here are some things I've encountered that might help you:

1) Talk to your hosting provider and ask them what's the limit. Maybe it's much more than what you think. I know that GoDaddy dedicated servers have a 30k limit per day which they will raise to 60k if you ask nicely, though they will monitor the contents every now and then (still it's a pain to ask them as you have to talk to mostly EVERYONE in the company to get this done)
2) If you're using phpguru's HTML MIME mail library (both versions) there seems to be a problem with badly encoded non-english strings, and emails will be sent more than once.
3) If you hosting provider caps your outgoing emails, you can try using your own ISP's email server (which shouldn't be a problem for 100 mails or so).
4) If not, just get one of the big companies to handle your email (I guess mass mailing is now called "Mareting Campain"). 100 mails should be cheap enough and depending on who you hire, there's usually more chances of getting through to people's inboxes than trying your own home grown solution.
5) Add the "Precedence: bulk" header if you are getting a lot of messages into SPAM folders.
6) Add support for http://www.list-unsubscribe.com.

Hmmm I can't think of anything else right now...

[mikes02]

I have the same problem in FF3 at times posting here.

[MikeDS]

Poisa, thanks a lot for that list, will definitely give me lots to think about (a couple of points I hadn't thought of as well...!)

I don't really envisage us sending more then 200-300 emails a day on it (and that's in the most extreme cases) so a limit like GoDaddy's will more then suffice. I shall have a look at the names you mentioned and carry on my research

Thanks again!!

[MikeDS]

Just before I continue, it is actually alright (as in, safe) to send emails just using PHP's mail() function? I've been playing around with the Pear MIME_Mail library and our email filter (Messagelabs) seems to mark the email as SPAM, whereas I don't seem to have encountered any probelms like that just using mail(), but I'm worried that there might be something in the background I've forgotten to consider...?

[poisa]

Yes, it's OK. In fact most of the email libraries around are just fancy for the mail() function and some give you the option to use other methods like outputting directly to sendmail's queue.