Hello, On 08/13/2002 01:44 AM, Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote: >> For high-volume mail delivery, you should be using a dedicated mailing >> list system. Have PHP send a single message to the list and let the list >> system do the mass-delivery for you. Right tool for the job and all... > > Totally agree. But just what is "high-volume" is my question ... I guess > I need to do some testing to find this out perhaps ... > > Would you have any recommendations on a simple mailing list system that > integrates well with PHP? I'm building a password protected site and > want to email users their passwords and also allow people to have their > passwords mailed to them. > > There would be about 10,000 users so I figure the demand for passwords > would be at most one per second during peak time.
If you really want something taylored to you needs, you'd better invest on something written by yourself. Most ready to mailing list systems do not integrate well with custom applications because they usually have only a limited set of functions that you need. You can do it all in PHP. Only the actual message delivery is better to rely in your local mailer because that is one particular thing that it is optimized for. All you need to do is to send the messages putting all recipients in Bcc:. If you use sendmail, or better like qmail, the actual queue time can be of just a few seconds per message to be delivered to tens of thousands of users. What takes a little time is subscriber list extraction. SQL based databases are not the best option for this purpose, but if your volume of list messages is low, that should not be a problem. For lists of higher volume of messages, you need to use something more efficient. Some dedicated mailing list managers like ezmlm use DBM like databases to store subscriber information. These are much faster to query than SQL databases. If your rate of subscriptions/unsubscriptions is higher than the new message rate, you can just hold subscriber list caches in simple text files so you avoid lengthy database queries. When a user subscribes or unsubscribes, you just update the cache or at least flags it somehow that next message that is sent, the cache needs to be updated. Smart software often beats fast software. All this can be written in PHP hands down as long as you write it smartly. :-) -- Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
