Mass Mailing Crisis

[csbrad]

Hello, I am new to this forum and i am in dire need of some help.
I need to make a program that will be capable of sending out a blast email to 3,000-50,000 users.
I previouslly made a program that used the mail() and a while loop, and it made the server crash and or produced errors. As i have recentlly discovered many people seem to think that the mail() wont be good enough for this number of emails.
I have also researched for two days on sending it with SMTP and have not figured that out yet.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make a program capable of blasting out 3,000-50,000 emails?

Thank you for reading, and thanks in advance.

[areidmtm]

You must be crazy if you want to send out up to 50,000 emails from a shared server!

Bluehost limits the send of emails to 50 an hour. You can get that raised to 500 for illegitimate needs. With 50,000 emails, that would take you about a week to send.

If you need to send that many out, you need a VPS.

Sorry to be so down, but you'll run into a lot of problems trying to send out that many emails from a shared server.

[csbrad]

Well we are willing to do whatever we have to do to get this to work, so a shared server isnt neccisarilly the only option right now. Thank you for your response I will look into a VPS as one option.

I read an article on fsockopen() and SMTP and it made it seem like you could send many emails with it, have you heard of any methods of mass mailing that way?

Thanks again.

[charlesgan]

if the mass mailing is periodically.
Best is to setup own smtp server on a dedicated or vps server.

what it need is a dedicated server that allow you to setup software, and a dedicated IP. and find a free or 30 days trial smtp server to start with :D

No spamming... they will shut you down at the end.

[areidmtm]

I read an article on fsockopen() and SMTP and it made it seem like you could send many emails with it, have you heard of any methods of mass mailing that way?

Yeah you certainly can send email that way with PHP, but again, you'll run into problems with the email per hour limit bluehost has.

They reason why the have the limit in the first place is to divert any spamming attempts. No spammer will waste their time if they can only send out 50 emails an hour. You can get it raise, but you will still have a hard time sending out that many emails. It also sounds like to me that you want to send them all out at basically the same time. With bluehost, that will be impossible.

[Early Out]

Well we are willing to do whatever we have to do to get this to work,....In that case, Google for bulk email service, and you'll find a bunch of places that will do the mass mailing for you. Easier than beating your head against the wall trying to find a way to do it yourself!

[csbrad]

Well we are actually trying to make our own bulk emailing program. We would like to send news/updates to our customers.

If we had a dedicated server and an smtp set up, could we send 50,000 emails with the mail() ?
--and thanks again for all the help i really appreciate this--

[areidmtm]

If we had a dedicated server and an smtp set up, could we send 50,000 emails with the mail() ?

Yes, but you probably shouldn't send out 50,000 emails with the PHP mail() function. To be more efficient, you'd want to create an SMTP link and send email that way. There are scripts out there that will do that. Look at phpmailer (http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/)

[cferron]

Bluehost limits the send of emails to 50 an hour. You can get that raised to 500 for illegitimate needs.

We are a small Ultimate Frisbee Association how can we request that raise?

Thanks

Claude

[areidmtm]

We are a small Ultimate Frisbee Association how can we request that raise?

Thanks

Claude

500 email an hour is the limit. Anything higher than that, you'll need to have at least a VPS or use a program to throttle the email being sent to under 500 an hour.

[felgall]

To request the increase to 500 per hour simply ask BlueHost support - via livechat is probably easiest.

[areidmtm]

We are a small Ultimate Frisbee Association how can we request that raise?

Thanks

Claude

Sorry, felgall has the right answer. I miss read that. :o