Opinion about sending letters with php

Question

I am preparing a site that will send email notifications to registered users. In my experience, I know that sending emails is a bit of a painful process for PHP, especially when we talk about thousands. One of my websites emails from time to time to 1000-1500 people. It takes about 5 minutes for PHP to do this, so we run it overnight when the server load is the lowest. I use the built-in mail() function without SMTP. This works fine on a dedicated server, but I am not a big fan of this solution.

I want to be able to send such amounts at any time, without risking going down to the server (and it will be blacklisted).
I read that the ideal solution is to send letters in batches (say, 20) every couple of minutes with a script that runs Cron. This seems like a really reasonable idea to me, but ... What if I don’t have access to Cron (not all hosting providers provide access to it) and the website is not popular enough to run the script on the download page?

I insist on using my server for mailing, and not for any external solution.

PS. I found such solutions: http://www.mywebcron.com/ , but is this good?

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EDIT

Just add:

• I am using CodeIgniter,
• the rate at which emails are sent from my current server is usually 0.2 seconds. by email.

Answer 1

Using a PHP mailer class such as PHPmailer or SwiftMailer , you can send mail directly through SMTP in a way that will be much faster. And yes, sending a large number of emails is best done through cron, so you send X emails every minute. This way you avoid server overload. If you can’t create cron jobs on your server, I suggest you switch the hosting provider, otherwise the website associated with you will be your only viable alternative (but you, depending on some third party, this is not very cool)

Answer 2

If you cannot use a periodic task, you may need to find a solution for the queue, such as Gearman.

What would you like to do is send all your emails to the queue and have 1 or more long-term workers who select jobs from the queue. If you want to add a delay to the system, just add sleep there.

Some really basic pseudo codes:

 #wherever you launch the jobs from for each user gearman.push(user.generateEmail()) #in your consumer script while true message = gearman.consume() message.send() sleep(5)