5 replies to this topic

[evertonian7uk]

hi guys,

i need a decent mass emailing program to send newsletters to my game players, ive been using phplist but now my member base has grown i cant use it any more,

ive had a look through google and theres loads to choose from, but im not sure which is best etc..

has anyone used mass mailing programs before?? im sending out to 10,000 people, what would you recommend?


Thanks to anyone that can help

[Jacorre]

Take a look at Campaign Monitor.

[evertonian7uk]

that was one i checked the problem is the 1cent per email after 5 free ones, im looking at sending 10,000 it suddenly becomes expensive to email my members,

i seen a few like massmailer and mail bomber but they look like spammers, i really dont want to get blacklisted.

thanks for the input Jacorre

[N4Z.]

Mail your members?

A simple newsletter script will do the trick

Theres thousands.. just google it

You can customize any newsletter script to make it send to a lot of people.

I did this for my old school database Even today they're none the wiser that they are using a dodgey newsletter script i found in HotScripts i believe

**Note: Using a newsletter script means you cannot receive emails back unless you give them an email to reply back to, eg: To get back to me, email me at s0ldier@p2l.com etc.**

Edited by S0LDIER., 31 December 2006 - 05:55 AM.

[evertonian7uk]

wont the simple ones cause me to be blacklisted like spam or can you control how many it sends per hour??

i dont want to be done for spamming when its not, just trying to be safe.

thanks for the help tho, im reading through hotscripts looking now

[Demonslay]

If you know how, try to make the script control itself, like have it be controlled by a cronjob, run once an hour (or whatever the limit would be, you can ask your host on what thier limit is before blacklisting you). It could retrieve, say, 20 (I would start small until you talk to your host about the topic), and have it pull the first 20 entries from your database, then have a way of storing where on the list the script is, such as in a .txt file or in the database. Then, the next time the cron job activates the script, it will pull that last result set from that .txt file etc, and continue from there.
Simple example.

// Variables
$subject = 'Your Subject';
$message = wordwrap('Your Message', 70); // Just read up that lines cannot be longer than 70 characters, so just to make sure if your message is long, use wordwrap()
$headers = 'From: you@yoursite.com' . "\r\n" .
   'Reply-To: you@yoursite.com' . "\r\n" .
   'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
$emails_limit = 20; // How many emails to send each time script is run
$start = (int)file_get_contents('mail_counter.txt'); // Get last results sent
// Grab Emails and Send
$get_emails = mysql_query("SELECT `email` FROM `members` LIMIT $start, $emails_limit") or die(mysql_error());
while($e = mysql_fetch_array($get_emails)) mail($e['email'], $subject, $message, $headers);
// Open Counter and Increment
$counter = fopen('mail_counter.txt', 'w+');
$results = mysql_num_rows($get_emails);
fwrite($counter, (($results > 0) ? $start + $results : 0)); // Either increment by number of rows returned, or start back at 0 if we've reached the end of all emails to be sent
fclose($counter);

I think you should read up on this page, it talks about using PEAR for mass emailing, and I don't know squat about PEAR, so can't help much there.
PHP Mail Function

Edited by Demonslay, 01 January 2007 - 11:59 AM.