Stagger Mass Email

[trenzterra]

I'm not sure where to put this... but I'm just asking whether does phpBB3 have the ability to stagger mass email sending?

If not I hope a mod will be made for it soon...

[Eelke]

Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not a native speaker and wasn't sure what you meant by stagger, exactly. I had a look around and found that it may mean "scheduling", and in reference to email in particular I found a mass email might be scheduled to be sent according to geographic location of the recipient, so that everyone gets the message at, say, tuesday morning. Is that what you mean? I don't think the mass email of phpBB is anything like that sophisticated, and I don't think it should be either (not out of the box, specialist requirements like that are best left to mods).

[marinedalek]

My immediate thought when I read the topic was that it could be useful to send a mass email in small batches. On a large forum with hundreds of users, sending the mails all at once could crash the mail server and/or be interpreted as a DOS attack, whereas if smaller batches of emails were sent every 20 or 30 seconds the mail server wouldn't get flooded as much.

Of course I could be talking a load of dingos' kidneys.

[Yoda_IRC]

On a large forum with hundreds of users, sending the mails all at once could crash the mail server and/or be interpreted as a DOS attack,

I'm not entirely sure about this, so someone with more knowledge than me jump in, but do you really need to send a copy of the email per user to your mail server? don't you send one copy with a nice big BCC list?

On a busy mail server they wouldn't notice a few hundered messages, how many messages do you think Gmail get (and there still in beta)?

Of course sending a lot of email anywhere can make you look like a spammer no matter how you do it.

But of course you're more at risk of looking like a spammer if you decide to operate your mail serer as an open relay, that will get you on the sorbs blacklist quite quickly (not actually tested how long it takes them but don't try it, we don't need or want any more open relays on the web).

Shared hosting can also be a problem if some idiot uses it to spam, once on a blacklist its hard to get removed.

The problem with scheduling is how does phpBB know when to send a message, its a php script and so needs to be invoked, it can't wait as most servers will terminate your script if you try and run it for hours. It could check everytime someone loads a page, but what if noone loads a page for a while. Of course there is Cron, the perfect solution with one minor flaw, many hosts will not give you access to cron.

[Paul]

So far I know there is a kind of mail quee, so much emails will not be send together.

[trenzterra]

My immediate thought when I read the topic was that it could be useful to send a mass email in small batches. On a large forum with hundreds of users, sending the mails all at once could crash the mail server and/or be interpreted as a DOS attack, whereas if smaller batches of emails were sent every 20 or 30 seconds the mail server wouldn't get flooded as much.

Of course I could be talking a load of dingos' kidneys.

Yes, that it was I meant.

By sending via BCC the server has to send 2000 (in my case) of the same email to different addresses, and the last time I did that I got a 'high load' warning from my host.