Sending hundreds of eMails

[David Beck]

Hi Dan,

The technique Mark describes is the same that we use. In our case we use CallPHP to facilitate calling the PHP function that sends the mail. We send tens of thousands of emails a day using this approach. We actually queue up the emails to be sent in a server side MySQL database, and then a cron job takes care of the actually sending via PHP's mail() command, around 100 per minute. We had to switch to the queue approach because sendmail was getting overloaded. CallPHP can be found at:

http://www.rotundasoftware.com/livecode/

Note you need your own web server, and you might need a dedicated server, because some ISPs limit outgoing emails from shared hosts, or filter them and block some that they determine to be high spam risk. (That was just our experience with aplus.net, it might be that you have no problems using a shared host to send lots of email, especially in small amounts.)

Hope that helps.

David Beck
Rotunda Software

On Jan 5, 2012, at 10:00 AM, use-livecode-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 16:00:50 +0100
> From: Mark Schonewille <m.schonewille at economy-x-talk.com>
> To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
> Subject: Re: Sending hundreds of eMails
> Message-ID: <B4410F26-A0BC-4EDE-A926-09FED0E90475 at economy-x-talk.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Hi Dan,
> 
> Obviously, you don't want to use Gmail. You'd be marked as a spammer and you'd be out of business soon.
> 
> Tell your customer to get a decent web server and his own domain. Use some PHP scripts to which LiveCode can connect. Put the e-mail on the server, so you won't need to send it each time you send a customised e-mail. Send that e-mail address, recipient name and other data to the server, have the PHP script glue the data and message together and use PHP's sendmail() function to send the e-mail.
> 
> I do this a few times every year. If you want, I can help you with it. Assuming it it a commercial project, I won't do it for free but I think it doesn't need to cost much.
> 
> --
> Best regards,
> 
> Mark Schonewille