PHP Forum

**milomedia** · 06-11-2004, 01:43 PM

Heya,

I've got a nice CMS that I set up for my clients, over the years it has evolved to be a pretty nice package. A new feature is a mailing list manager, basically I have one table that is email addresses (all collected via the site when someone signs up - no spamming here) and a second table that makes up the actual email.

So the owner of the business goes to "email" in their manager and selects a mail that they want to send (or creates the mail) then opts to see if they want to send it to the whole list or to just one address to test.

The problem starts here

I have a while loop that goes through the email table and sends the mail to each address on the list. I'm guessing that there must be a more efficent way to do this. Now when i execute that command my browser will time out before it goes through all the emails, however, the script is fully executing, as the last people on the list did indeed receive the mail.

Should I make an array of addresses and include them as BCC? How many addresses can you put as BCC? I'd like to basically make it less resource intensive and I'd like to know that it finished rather than having my browser time out and wonder if it all happened.. Thanks in advance

Cheers... -e

**milomedia** · 06-21-2004, 01:50 PM

hrmph!

**Christopher** · 06-21-2004, 02:00 PM

You should do a batch at a time. You do everything as you are right now, but instead of doing the 1000 all at once, you do like 50 (for example). So just make a loop that does 50, refreshes the page, does another 50 etc etc. I'm not sure how practical 50 really is, just using it as an example.

**milomedia** · 06-21-2004, 02:55 PM

I was thinking that.... you don't by chance know how I'd do that, do you? ;-)

**Christopher** · 06-21-2004, 03:00 PM

You say you have a table with the email addy's that the emails go out to? Then just do the first 50, refresh the page with a query string, then use that as your query.

PHP Code:


			
$start = $_GET['start'];

$sql = "SELECT * FROM emails LIMIT $start, 50";

// ... do all the email stuff

header('Location: myscript.php?start=' . $start + 50);

You get the idea

**milomedia** · 06-24-2004, 07:03 PM

Hi,

will header() refresh the page on its own? Reason I'm asking is, If i screw up I don't want 1500 people getting an email about it, lol

I also have some conditionals leading upto the mailing, so the client selects which campaign from a pull down, I guess I just need to send those $campaignid, etc along with each refresh?

Oh, and THANKS!!!

**Christopher** · 06-24-2004, 07:22 PM

Well, I'd redirect with javascript instead. That way you can be sure you don't have any pesky 'headers already sent' errors etc.

I would make an auto-submitting form. That way, any specific information you have can just be thrown into a hidden form field. Here:

Code:

<html>
<head>
    <title>Testing</title>
    <script language="javascript">
    function doCountdown()
    {
        window.status = 'Refreshing in ... ' + timekeep + ' seconds';
        var tid = setTimeout('doCountdown();', 1000);
        if(timekeep > 0)
            timekeep -= 1;
        else
        {
            clearTimeout(tid);
            document.forms.redirect_form.submit();
        }
    }
    var timekeep = 5;
    doCountdown();
    </script>
</head>
<body>

<form action="myscript.php" method="get" name="redirect_form">
<input type="hidden" name="some_important_var" value="some_value" />
<input type="hidden" name="another_var" value="another_value" />
</form>

</body>
</html>

This will keep a countdown from 5 to zero, then auto submit the form. Auto-submitting the form will effectively create a redirect (which will be to the same page but with different values.). So all you have to do is plug the required variables into the form.

**milomedia** · 07-06-2004, 05:54 PM

Thanks so much, this rocks