Sending mail, Perl and cron jobs :)

[probedb]

Hi all,

A client of mine uses bluehost and I have a problem. Being a nightclub they have a mailing list which a few thousand people on it and want to be able to create mailouts from time to time.

Bluehost has spam protection to limit the mails to 500/hour which is all fine but for when these mailouts get sent.

I thought of a solution of basically dumping any emails that need to be sent into a database table, then calling a Perl script that's triggered by an hourly/bi-hourly cron job so it can process the table and send so many emails?

Does this sound like a reasonable plan? If so any thoughts on a Perl script to use....been a few years since I did Perl.

Cheers in advance!

Paul.

[phprocket]

Hi all,

A client of mine uses bluehost and I have a problem. Being a nightclub they have a mailing list which a few thousand people on it and want to be able to create mailouts from time to time.

Bluehost has spam protection to limit the mails to 500/hour which is all fine but for when these mailouts get sent.

I thought of a solution of basically dumping any emails that need to be sent into a database table, then calling a Perl script that's triggered by an hourly/bi-hourly cron job so it can process the table and send so many emails?

Does this sound like a reasonable plan? If so any thoughts on a Perl script to use....been a few years since I did Perl.

Cheers in advance!

Paul.



HI..

Your plan sounds like a good one.. this is the system that some newsletter scripts use.. I am not quite sure if the 500 a hour is the limit they may have a daily limit also.. but like I said I am not quite sure.

You don't have to use CGI only.. you could also use php..

Make a database in mysql simular to this... making sure sent defaults to zero "0"


--------------------------
| id | email | sent |
--------------------------


Select email FROM table WHERE sent='0' LIMIT 500

Then select 500 and do a while statement and update each after they are sent.. marking sent as 1

;)

[probedb]

Cheers for that :) It's exactly what I had in mind bar a few customisations for the emails that get sent out.

What command is it run a php file, just

php [phpfile including path]

?? Reason I wanted to use Perl was that PHP has a habit of timing out when you don't want it to :)

[siguie]

Well it's a simple perl script to write just be sure to use CGI.pm and "strict". You may also want to look at phplist which is a full newsletter manager and can be configured to send out batches of emails per hour too.

[ahwm]

I was going to do something very similar to that for a fansite I set up. But I haven't as yet. The only limit I'm aware of is 500/hour (if you get BH to increase it for you -- default is 50/hour).

PHP should be simple to do. But I don't know Perl, either... :P