I need to be able to send emails to contacts
stored in a database(its for newsletter not spam :P). I'm able to do this using mail() and a loop, but
I've read that this isn't a very good idea as there could be a few
hundred contacts.
What is the best way to go about this? Any advice or pointers in the
right direction will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.
mail() will be very slow with several hundred contacts. I recommend swiftmailer at http://www.swiftmailer.org. Here's an example of sending many mails from thier site:
require_once 'lib/swift_required.php';
//Create the Transport
$transport = Swift_SmtpTransport::newInstance('localhost', 25);
//Create the Mailer using your created Transport
$mailer = Swift_Mailer::newInstance($transport);
//Create a message
$message = Swift_Message::newInstance('Wonderful Subject')
->setFrom(array('john#doe.com' => 'John Doe'))
->setTo(array('receiver#domain.org', 'other#domain.org' => 'A name'))
->setBody('Here is the message itself')
;
//Send the message
$numSent = $mailer->batchSend($message);
And you can use your SMTP connection/account to send, or sendmail.
Related
I already deployed the Email Service I developed on the Chicago Server. Last Friday 11:30pm in Philippine time, I tested the sending and it run's properly, but when I checked my email there's no message in inbox or spam. And then, Saturday 1:30am, I've noticed that I received the message that I tested last Friday.
Please advice me guys! thanks!
My Questions is:
a.) Do I need to configure something on the Server to make the real time receiving on emails?
here's my code:
//send email
MailMessage objEmail = new MailMessage(new MailAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["emailAdd"].ToString()), new MailAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["emailAdd"].ToString()));
objEmail.Subject = "Test";
objEmail.Body = "CODE:" + _Message;
objEmail.Priority = MailPriority.High;
SmtpClient SmtpMail = new SmtpClient();
SmtpMail.Host = "localhost";
SmtpMail.Send(objEmail);
Put this one on your code:
SmtpMail.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis;
And also, configure the relay restrictions on the SMTP server that will allow your 120.0.0.1/localhost..
Last, configure the firewall and port forwarding on the server.
I hope this will help you..
PHP's mail() function sends mail fine, but Swiftmailer's Swift_MailTransport doesn't work!
This works:
mail('user#example.com', 'test '.date('H:i:s'), '');
But this does not:
$transport = Swift_MailTransport::newInstance('');
$mailer = Swift_Mailer::newInstance($transport);
$message = Swift_Message::newInstance('test '.date('H:i:s'))
->setFrom('user#example.com')
->setTo('user#example.com')
->setBody('Testing one two three');
$result = $mailer->send($message);
(The user#example.com is replaced by a valid email address in my test code.)
The mail logs for both events look very similar in both cases, and it appears that mail is being sent in the latter.
Could there be something about the message constructed by Swiftmailer that is causing it to be blocked by a spam filter?
(By the way, I have tried using the SMTP transport, with no luck; I figured that since mail() works correctly, it would be trivial to switch to Swiftmail's Mail transport...)
Which mail server are you using(like your web server or gmail,yahoo..)
this is for gmail SMTP,
$transport = Swift_SmtpTransport::newInstance('smtp.gmail.com', 465, "ssl")
->setUsername($login_id)
->setPassword($password)
;
$mailer = Swift_Mailer::newInstance($transport);
$message = Swift_Message::newInstance('test '.date('H:i:s'))
->setFrom('user#example.com')
->setTo('user#example.com')
->setBody('Testing one two three');
$result = $mailer->send($message);
if mail() function works, then SwiftMailer should also work.
Hope it worked for you, and helped you.
I have a client with 5000 emails from an old list he has that he wants to promote his services to. He wants to know which emails on the list are still valid. I want to check them for him - without sending out 5K emails randomly and then being listed as a spammer or something. Ideas?
You can validate the email via SMTP without sending an actual email.
http://code.google.com/p/php-smtp-email-validation/
You could also send emails out, and check for bounces.
bucabay's answer is the way forward. What a library like that essentially does is checking for existing DNS record for (mail) servers at specified domains (A, MX, or AAAA). After that, it do what's termed callback verification. That's where you connect to the mail server, tell it you want to send to a particular email address and see if they say OK.
For callback verification, you should note greylisting servers say OK to everything so there is no 100% guarantee possible without actually sending the emails out. Here's some code I used when I did this manually. It's a patch onto the email address parser from here.
#
# Email callback verification
# Based on http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.getmxrr.php
#
if (strlen($bits['domain-literal'])){
$records = array($bits['domain-literal']);
}elseif (!getmxrr($bits['domain'], $mx_records, $mx_weight)){
$records = array($bits['domain']);
}else{
$mxs = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < count($mx_records); $i++){
$mxs[$mx_records[$i]] = $mx_weight[$i];
}
asort($mxs);
$records = array_keys($mxs);
}
$user_okay = false;
for ($j = 0; $j < count($records) && !$user_okay; $j++){
$fp = #fsockopen($records[$j], 25, $errno, $errstr, 2);
if($fp){
$ms_resp = "";
$ms_resp .= send_command($fp, "HELO ******.com");
$ms_resp .= send_command($fp, "MAIL FROM:<>");
$rcpt_text = send_command($fp, "RCPT TO:<" . $email . ">");
$ms_resp .= $rcpt_text;
$ms_code = intval(substr($rcpt_text, 0, 3));
if ($ms_code == 250 || $ms_code == 451){ // Accept all user account on greylisting server
$user_okay = true;
}
$ms_resp .= send_command($fp, "QUIT");
fclose($fp);
}
}
return $user_okay ? 1 : 0;
I think you need to send the emails to find out. Also, this is pretty much exactly what a spammer is, thus the reason for getting put on spammer lists. Sending in bursts will help you hide this fact though.
You'll have to email them at least once.
Create a new email list. Send the old list an email with a link they need to click on to continue receiving messages (re-subscribe).
Send them all an email and collect all reply-to bounces on a real email account, then purge those bounced emails from your main list.
Send them all an HTML email, and one of the images is remotely hosted and requires a unique ID to request it that you set in each email. When your web server returns that image to their client, you can then consider that email as active. This is called a web bug, and will only work if the person automatically loads remote images in their client.
https://github.com/kamilc/email_verifier is a rubygem that will check that the MX record exists and that the SMTP server says the address has a valid mailbox.
You can use a paid service like Kickbox to do this as well.
You can consider the MailboxValidator service http://www.mailboxvalidator.com/ which should be adequate for your requirement. You can get either a bulk plan where you can upload a CSV file containing your email list or get the API plan if you require programmatic integrations.
I have a simple email sender for user account activation. Depending on which email address I use, I get significantly different response times: University email - 1 minute, Gmail - 3-4 hours, Yahoo - 1 or 2 days -- which seems bizarre. Has anyone else seen this phenomenon?
EDIT:
There weren't many responses (even for a bounty), but I'll try to explain my problem more clearly.
This probably isn't greylsting -- If I so a simple:
php mail ($to, $subject, $body) // this delivers instantly.
My cakephp code:
function __sendActivationEmail($id) {
$User = $this->User->read ( null, $id );
$this->set ( 'suffix_url', $User ['User'] ['id'] . '/' . $this->User->getActivationHash () );
$this->set ( 'username', $User ['User'] ['username'] );
$this->Email->to = $User ['User'] ['email'];
$this->Email->subject = 'Test.com - ' . __ ( 'please confirm your email address', true );
$this->Email->from = 'noreply#test.com';
$this->Email->template = 'user_confirm';
$this->Email->sendAs = 'text';
$this->Email->delivery = 'mail';
$this->Email->send ();
}
Causes delays from 13 minutes (ok; we'll deal with it) to 5-6 hours (less okay, since this is an activation email). For some of my users, it works instantly, but for other users (of the same service provider, i.e., gmail, it sees these delays).
Any clues?
The code looks fine, but it of course doesn't tell anything about the mail server's configuration.
3-4 hours I would put down to Greylisting, but 1-2 days is definitely too much. Is this reproducible? How many addresses have you tried this with?
What do the full headers of the (received) mails look like? The "received from: .... "path should tell you at which point it took 1-2 days to deliver.
Maybe you can install PHPMailer as a Vendor and create a Component called "Mail"...
And don't forget to authenticate with your SMTP server! :)
Ignore the whole PHP element of it for a moment.
If its a linux server for example, send a mail from the command line e.g. mail myemail#me.com
see if the same thing is happening that way. Its quite likely its a server configuration issue not a php or cakePHP issue.
Look up a few basics like having a FQDN and maybe look into setting up SPF records for your email. Make sure the emails are coming from your domain name not someone elses e.g. not the users email.
Also check if you have email spam software set up that could be grey listing you email on the way out (unlikely but possible). the mostly like thing is the destination spam filter is delaying it. Try send to a gmail account and see if it gets through fine or goes into spam.
Do all this without touching PHP, if all is going fine there then set up a basic php script to do a basic email not using CakePHP, if that works fine then you know its CakePHP etc but I doubt it.
So after further digging, I realized that it was our server host's problem. We use Slicehost, and it just so happens that a range of ips that had been blacklisted included our own ip. We got our name off the list, and we're good to go.
I try to send a simple Email via CakePHP's Email Component. I'm using following code from the cookbook documentation:
$this->Email->from = 'Irgendjemand <irgendjemand#example.com>';
$this->Email->to = 'Irgendjemand Anderes <irgendjemand.anderes#example.com>';
$this->Email->subject = 'Test';
$this->Email->send('Dies ist der Nachrichtenrumpf!');
The send()-method does only return a boolean value with the value false - but no error or warning occurs.
Does somebody have a solution for that?
Have you tried changing the delivery options? There are three options: mail, smtp and debug.
$this->Email->delivery = 'debug';
$this->Email->send('test message');
debug($this->Session->read('Message.email'));
You can debug with EMail. Set the delivery to debug and the email message will be set to Session.message:
if (Configure::read('debug') > 1) {
$this->Email->delivery = 'debug';
}
$ret = $this->Email->send();
if (Configure::read('debug') > 1) {
pr($this->Session->read('Message.email'));
}
Which OS are you on? If Windows, this note may be of interest:
Note: The Windows implementation of mail() differs in many ways from the Unix implementation.
...
As such, the to parameter should not be an address in the form of
"Something <someone#example.com>". The mail command may not parse this properly while talking with the MTA.
Secondly, it may just be the case that no mail server will accept outgoing mail from your local machine due to spam protection. I have often seen that the same mail() function will not work locally, but works fine once uploaded to a trustworthy server. You could try to use an authenticated mail relay in that case (SMTP).