How to send 100 000 emails weekly

Question

How can one send an email to 100 000 users on a weekly basis in PHP  This includes mail to subscribers using the following providers    AOL G-Mail Hotmail Yahoo   It is important that all e-mail actually be delivered  to the extent that it is possible  Obviously  just sending the mail conventionally would do nothing but create problems   Is there a library for PHP that makes this simpler

User · Answer

Here is what I did recently in PHP on one of my bigger systems:

User inputs newsletter text and selects the recipients (which generates a query to retrieve the email addresses for later).
Add the newsletter text and recipients query to a row in mysql table called *email_queue*
- (The table email_queue has the columns "to" "subject" "body" "priority")
I created another script, which runs every minute as a cron job. It uses the SwiftMailer class. This script simply:
- during business hours, sends all email with priority == 0
- after hours, send other emails by priority

Depending on the hosts settings, I can now have it throttle using standard swiftmailers plugins like antiflood and throttle...

$mailer->registerPlugin(new Swift_Plugins_AntiFloodPlugin(50, 30));

and

$mailer->registerPlugin(new Swift_Plugins_ThrottlerPlugin( 100, Swift_Plugins_ThrottlerPlugin::MESSAGES_PER_MINUTE ));

etc, etc..

I have expanded it way beyond this pseudocode, with attachments, and many other configurable settings, but it works very well as long as your server is setup correctly to send email. (Probably wont work on shared hosting, but in theory it should...) Swiftmailer even has a setting

$message->setReturnPath

Which I now use to track bounces...

Happy Trails! (Happy Emails?)

User · Answer

People have recommended MailChimp which is a good vendor for bulk email   If you re looking for a good vendor for transactional email  I might be able to help   Over the past 6 months  we used four different SMTP vendors with the goal of figuring out which was the best one   Here s a summary of what we found     AuthSMTP   Cheapest around No analysis reporting No tracking for opens clicks Had slight hesitation on some sends    Postmark   Very cheap  but not as cheap as AuthSMTP Beautiful cpanel but no tracking on opens clicks Send-level activity tracking so you can open a single email that was sent and look at how it looked and the delivery data  Have to use API   Sending by SMTP was recently introduced but it s buggy   For instance  we noticed that quotes     in the subject line are stripped  Cannot send any attachment you want   Must be on approved list of file types and under a certain size    10 MB I think  Requires a set list of from names addresses    JangoSMTP   Expensive in relation to the others     more than 10 times in some cases Ugly cpanel but great tracking on opens clicks with email-level detail Had hesitation  at times  when sending   On two occasions  sends took an hour to be delivered Requires a set list of from name addresses    SendGrid   Not quite a cheap as AuthSMTP but still very cheap   Many customers can exist on 200 free sends per day  Decent cpanel but no in-depth detail on open click tracking Lots of API options   Options  open click tracking  etc  can be custom defined on an email-by-email basis   Inbound  reply  email can be posted to our HTTP end point  Absolutely zero hesitation on sends   Every email sent landed in the inbox almost immediately  Can send from any from name address    Conclusion  SendGrid was the best with Postmark coming in second place   We never saw any hesitation in send times with either of those two - in some cases we sent several hundred emails at once - and they both have the best ROI  given a solid featureset

User · Answer

Short answer  While it s technically possible to send 100k e-mails each week yourself  the simplest  easiest and cheapest solution is to outsource this to one of the companies that specialize in it  I did say  cheapest   there s no limit to the amount of development time  and therefore money  that you can sink into this when trying to DIY    Long answer  If you decide that you absolutely want to do this yourself  prepare for a world of hurt  after all  this is e-mail e-fail we re talking about   You ll need    e-mail content that is not spam  otherwise you ll run into additional major roadblocks on every step  even legal repercussions  in addition  your content should be easy to distinguish from spam - that may be a bit hard to do in some cases  I heard that a certain pharmaceutical company had to all but abandon e-mail  as their brand names are quite common in spams  a configurable SMTP server of your own  one which won t buckle when you dump 100k e-mails onto it  your ISP s upstream server won t be sufficient here and you ll make the ISP violently unhappy  we used two dedicated boxes  some mail wrapper  e g  PhpMailer if PHP s your poison of choice  using PHP s mail   is horrible enough by itself  your own sender function to run in a loop  create the mails and pass them to the wrapper  note that you may run into PHP s memory limits if your app has a memory leak  you may need to recycle the sending process periodically  or even better  decouple the  creating e-mails  and  sending e-mails  altogether    Surprisingly  that was the easy part  The hard part is actually sending it    some servers will ban you when you send too many mails close together  so you need to shuffle and watch your queue  e g  send one mail to joe example com  then three to other domains  only then another to otheraddress example com  you need to have correct PTR  SPF  DKIM records handling remote server timeouts  misconfigured DNS records and other network pleasantries handling invalid e-mails  and no  regex is the wrong tool for that  handling unsubscriptions  many legitimate newsletters have been reclassified as spam due to many frustrated users who couldn t unsubscribe in one step and instead chose to  mark as spam  - the spam filters do learn  esp  with large e-mail providers  handling bounces and rejects   no such mailbox ojhn example com   mailbox john example com full   handling blacklisting and removal from blacklists  Sure  you re not sending spam  Some recipients won t be so sure - with such large list  it will happen sometimes  no matter what precautions you take  Some people  e g  your not-so-scrupulous competitors  might even go as far to falsely report your mailings as spam - it does happen  On average  it takes weeks to get yourself removed from a blacklist     And to top it off  you ll have to manage the legal part of it  various federal  state  and local laws  and even different tangles of laws once you send outside the U S   note  you have no way of finding if joe hotmail com lives in Southwest Elbonia  the country with world s most draconian antispam laws     I m pretty sure I missed a few heads of this hydra - are you still sure you want to do this yourself  If so  there ll be another wave  this time merely the annoying problems inherent in sending an e-mail   You see  SMTP is a store-and-forward protocol  which means that your e-mail will be shuffled across many SMTP servers around the Internet  in the hope that the next one is a bit closer to the final recipient  Basically  the e-mail is sent to an SMTP server  which puts it into its forward queue  when time comes  it will forward it further to a different SMTP server  until it reaches the SMTP server for the given domain  This forward could happen immediately  or in a few minutes  or hours  or days  or never   Thus  you ll see the following issues - most of which could happen en route as well as at the destination    the remote SMTP servers don t want to talk to your SMTP server your mails are getting marked as spam   lt blink gt  is not your friend here  nor is  lt font color     gt   your mails are delivered days  even weeks late  contrary to popular opinion  SMTP is designed to make a best effort to deliver the message sometime in the future - not to deliver it now  your mails are not delivered at all  already sent from e-mail server on hop  4  not sent yet from server on hop  5  the server that currently holds the message crashes  data is lost  your mails are mangled by some braindead server en route  this one is somewhat solvable with base64 encoding  but then the size goes up and the e-mail looks more suspicious  your mails are delivered and the recipients seem not to want them   I m sure I didn t sign up for this  I remember exactly what I did a year ago   of course you do  sir   users with various versions of Microsoft Outlook and its special handling of Internet mail wizard s apprentice mode  a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop - in other words  automated e-mails as replies to automated e-mails as replies to     you really don t want to be the one to set this off  as you d anger half the internet at yourself    and it ll be your job to troubleshoot and solve this  hint  you can t  mostly   The people who run a legit mass-mailing businesses know that in the end you can t solve it  and that they can t solve it either - and they have the reasons well researched  documented and outlined  maybe even as a Powerpoint presentation - complete with sounds and cool transitions - that your bosses can understand   as they ve had to explain this a million times before  Plus  for the problems that are actually solvable  they know very well how to solve them   If  after all this  you are not discouraged and still want to do this  go right ahead  it s even possible that you ll find a better way to do this  Just know that the road ahead won t be easy - sending e-mail is trivial  getting it delivered is hard

[php] How to send 100,000 emails weekly?

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