RE: [cobalt-users] PHP mailing list on RaQ4i 256

["Achieve Website Design" <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Colin J. Raven" <duiker@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [cobalt-users] PHP mailing list on RaQ4i 256
Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 08:31:22 +0200
Reply-To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

|>One of my site clients has managed to collect just short of 5000 email
|>addresses from his customers when they have made purchases in
|>his bricks and mortar store. He wishes for me to write him a mailing
list
|>program to manage these addresses and enable him to send a marketing
message to
|>each one of them in turn, quickly and easily (the same message to all
addresses)

Why not mass-subscribe 'em all to Majordomo and let it do the work? It's
a bit spammy but perhaps the argument that they all bought product at
his bricks & mortar store might forestall further discussion at this
point. I suppose he asked 'em all for their email addy's, so maybe it's
a moot point.

|>I guess my question is to whether PHP would be allowed to
|>actually deliver that volume of mail to sendmail before the script
times out
|>(still set to default 30 seconds AFAIK)?
|>Addresses will be stored and retrieved from MySQL db.
|>Essentially would the script sending 5000 emails to sendmail in one
drop cause it
|>to crash/lock or would only a proportion of the messages ever arrive
at
|>sendmail due to spool size limitations?

Depending on what else is going on on that box - it might well. Soooo,
why not send 'em in spurts? That said however, if the email is simple
ASCII text and *does not* carry an attachment payload, 5000 'aint that
much.

|>Similarly would sending this volume have other detremental
|>effects on the overall servers ability to do it other tasks?

Same response as above - it might well plus other comment.

|>I'd appreciate any insights as to the current capacity of the sendmail
|>spool, and how many emails I can realistically expect my
|>script to be able to send in one pass.

The size of the spool can be defined at compile time I believe, but that
doesn't apply to thse boxes, 'cos it's already built and frankly God
alone knows what would happen if you attempted to rebuild sendmail - a
process which in itself although conceptually complex but in the general
scheme of things, actually trivial. IMHO Sendmail sucks, but I've never
been successful at installing Postfix (which handles this kind of thing
which much greater aplomb) on any Cobalt appliance.

[Side Note] If anyone *has* managed to replace Sendmail with Postfix on
either RAQ2's or Qube2's, please post a howto with landmine avoidance
tactics annotated!!

Back on topic again; I have a small script that works for occasional
tasks like this, and it could be called from a webpage if that's what
the client wants.
I wouldn't give any client access to the CLI, but since you indicate he
wanted you to build the proggy, maybe you could run it for him and
charge him for build and run....dunno, not appropriate for me to comment
further, it's your business and your client.

So, do you want this small hand rolled jobby?? It's done 70,000 emails
on a Qube2 with 128MB RAM (BUT in fairness, nothing else other than
basic services going on) and didn't stress the box one bit. I'd be happy
to post it to the list.

Regards,
-Colin
--
Colin J. Raven

Colin,
I'd like to have a look at your script, as I too have a client who would
like to something similar.
Thanks & Regards,
Declan.