Blasting emails in bulk, how to approach this?

I'm using a homemade PHP script with PHPmailer for sending email, currently I just do one select statement in MYSQL and then run a 100-150 email send request from PHPmailer via a for loop.

m开发者_运维百科y problem is that I have to port this script to a 7000 user mailing list, and I know it's not going to hold up since sending to 150 takes about 8 secs of execution time - also sending 7000 emails might mark me as a spammer or I won't be able to handle all responces.

I thought about splitting the 7000 into groups of like 200-500 and sending an email to each group every day until sending everyone - to do that i'll have to write a PHP script that handles the limits and remembers when & who on the list hasn't received that email yet and is due to receive it on the next batch.

What are my options, what are your thoughts?

Just my 2 cents.

1) I agree with Dave re: make it take longer than it needs. Most black/grey listing is the the recipient mail server deciding there is an odd amount of traffic compared to usual. Yahoo is terrible for this and given the sheer volume of domains they deal with, it can get annoying.

2) Using multiple IP addresses doesn't hurt. Extra IPs are usually free, and if you are using exim, you can easily configure it to use each IP based on e.g. EHLO, or send to domain etc etc. This means that there is less volume coming from any one IP.

3) Keep a track of bounce backs. Some providers will keep a track of the number of attempts to deliver mail to a non-existent address, the more you try, the more suspicious it looks. Easiest way to keep a track of them in my experience is to use VERPs and get PHP to process the incoming data.

4) Set up reverse DNS. Some hosts will just ignore the mail if you have not got it set up for the sender. I believe AOL is an example.

Just a few pointers from my experience.

Your first approach is a pretty good idea. As long as you're ok with it taking about 3 minutes to send all the emails (which it should be, if you're only sending a weekly newsletter or the like). To reduce the chance of getting marked spam, lower the threshold or make it take longer. Beyond that, it might be a good idea to move into a hosted mass mailing service.

The act of sending 7000 [or more] emails is not going to get you marked as a spammer ~assuming~ that the mail you are sending is:

• not spam
• contains complete & accurate header information

The only problem you might get is clogging up your mail queue, but you r volume is still pretty low. I would say for scalability - throttle your delivery over about an hour or so.

and consider ceejayoz's suggestion "MailChimp" it's free up to 5000 emails/month and has an excellent API that you can literally integrate into your app in a couple of hours.

-sean