Send a limited number of emails every hour with Perl Mime::Lite - perl

Question

I know that Perl Mime::Lite is deprecated, but I have to work on a hosted server where only Mime::Lite is installed. This server also limits to 500 the number of emails that can be sent every hour.
I have a large list of participants that need to be emailed instructions to complete questionnaires and reminders if they haven't completed their questionnaire weeks later. I have a script that check if they have completed their questionnaire and if a reminder should and has been sent or not. Otherwise a reminder is sent. However, I have to limit the number of emails sent to 500 per hour.
Is there a way to tell Mime::Lite to send 500 emails, wait 1 hour and then send 500 other emails or do I need to program it myself in perl using external files: Sending 500 emails, marking that those emails have been sent and at what time. Every time the script is run, it checks again if an email has to be sent and at what time the last email has been sent. If it is more than one hour from current time, it sends 500 new emails.
Or any other more convenient ways?
Just to be sure, my emails are legitimate and expected by the users (and wanted).

Answer 1

Mime::Lite itself doesn't implement this, but it's easy to implement yourself. Assuming you have a sub send_to($recipient, $msg) that actually uses Mime::Lite to send the message, you can wrap it with something like:
my $msg = ...;
my #recipients = ...;
while (#recipients) {
for (1 .. 500) {
last unless #recipients; # batch is implicitly over if we're out of people to send to
send_to(shift #recipients, $msg);
}
sleep 3600 if #recipients; # wait an hour before the next batch
}
Note that this is contingent upon your host server allowing you to keep a process running for enough hours to work through the entire list. If they don't, then you'll need to work up something with a database to track all recipients and which have already been mailed to.
Honestly, though, it would probably be better (and likely easier) to use real mailing list software to handle this instead of writing your own semi-functional list server. Perhaps your hosting service offers mailing lists as well?