Avoiding timeout while mass mailing

[Roger Dodger]

I have to send out 2500 e-mails to student survey recipients. The
e-mails will appear to come from the specific departments that they
belong to. I'm utilizing PHPmailer in the scripts I wrote to
accomplish this. I've written several pages to edit emails utilizing
placeholders so each individual email can be personalized for the
recipient, and selection page to choose recipients from the database.
The code I've written works just fine for small batches, but I'm unable
to test the mass mail as I don't have a suitable test list of email
addresses. I've adjusted the max_execution_time in the php.ini to 300
seconds, which should probably be long enough to send them all. I'll
start off sending in small batches, but eventually will want to just
send them out all at once for future mailings. Can you look at the
code below and suggest any other timeout issues that might appear?
Thanks all.

require("class.phpmailer.php");
require("dbconn.php");

session_start();

$mail = new PHPMailer();

$mail->Subject = $_SESSION['subject'];
$mail->Host = "smtp.*******.edu";
$mail->Mailer = "smtp";
$mail->AddBCC($_SESSION['bcc'],"SURVEY BCC");
$mail->SMTPKeepAlive = true;

$enabled_only = true;
$rs = getRecips($conn, $enabled_only); //Record set contains recipient
data

$i=0;

foreach ($rs as $row) {
$mail->From = $row['DEPT_CONTACT_EMAIL'];
$mail->FromName = $row['DEPT_CONTACT'];
$mail->AddReplyTo($row['DEPT_CONTACT_EMAIL'],$row['DEPT_CONTACT']);

// HTML body
$body = processHtmlBody($_SESSION['body'], $row, true);
// Plain text body (for mail clients that cannot read HTML)

$text_body = processTextBody($_SESSION['body'], $row, true);

$mail->Body = $body;
$mail->AltBody = $text_body;
$fullname = $row['FIRST_NAME']." ".$row['LAST_NAME'];
$mail->AddAddress($row['EMAIL'], $fullname);
if(!$mail->Send()) {
$_SESSION['send_result'][$i] = "Mail error sending to " .
$row['EMAIL'] . "<br />\nError Message: ".$mail->ErrorInfo."<br />\n";
}
else {
$_SESSION['send_result'][$i] = "Mail sent to ".$row['EMAIL']."
from department: ".$row['DEPT_NAME']."<br />\n";
}
$i++;
// Clear all addresses and reply-tos for next loop
$mail->ClearAddresses();
$mail->ClearReplyTos();

}
$mail->SmtpClose();
clearRecips($conn);

header("location: http://localhost:8080/phpmailer/mailresult.php");

[Jake]

Try adding set_time_limit(0); to the top of your script. This sets the
execution timelimit for this script to be infinite. Alternativly, you
could rewrite the script to send the email in batches to squeeze under
the normal timelimit restrictions.

-Jake

[Roger Dodger]

I've considered breaking it up into batches, but right now am relying
on the redirect and session variable to show send results and errors.
Maybe I should drop that information into a log file instead? If I
batched it, would that require some user input to continue the process,
or could it be set up to just load an intermediate page which redirects
back to the sending page if more emails are in the queue?

Jake wrote:

Try adding set_time_limit(0); to the top of your script. This sets the
execution timelimit for this script to be infinite. Alternativly, you
could rewrite the script to send the email in batches to squeeze under
the normal timelimit restrictions.

-Jake

[Satya]

What about writing a script such way that it send like 1000 mail and
sleep for 1 sec and start again

[Satya]

What about writing a script such way that it send like 1000 mail and
sleep for 1 sec and start again

[Jerry Stuckle]

Satya wrote:

What about writing a script such way that it send like 1000 mail and
sleep for 1 sec and start again

sleep() doesn't reset the timeout clock, so this doesn't work. In fact, since
you're sleeping during part of your total allowed time, you'll get even less done.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
js*******@attglobal.net
==================

[Roger Dodger]

Jerry Stuckle wrote:

Satya wrote:

What about writing a script such way that it send like 1000 mail and
sleep for 1 sec and start again

sleep() doesn't reset the timeout clock, so this doesn't work. In fact, since
you're sleeping during part of your total allowed time, you'll get even less done.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
js*******@attglobal.net
==================

So I went with the suggestion to use set_time_limit(0) at the top of
the script. That works just fine. I can send 2500 e-mails plus bcc
each one to a separate account in 4-6 minutes. To insure that there is
some record of what has been sent if the program were to crash, I open
a log file before the main loop, and record a success or error message
in the if (! $mail->send() ) { } else { } clause. It works great!

I've also managed to embed images in the mails as well, so if you are
looking for a mass mailer, I highly recommend the open source PHPmailer
class.

[twanglee]

hi i'm new to this forum and have a problem i own a small business and wish to xpand but i'm havin problems sending bulk emails can any one please help me

[twanglee]

hi i'm new to this forum and have a problem i own a small business and wish to xpand but i'm havin problems sending bulk emails can any one please help me