Sending mass email using PHP

Question

I am currently writing a music blog. The administrator posts a new article every 2-3 days. Once the administrator posts an article, a mass email will be sent to around 5000 subscribers immediately.

What is the best way to implement the mass mail feature?

Does the following function work?

function massmail() 
{
  $content = '...';
  foreach ($recipients as $r) {
    $_content = $content . '<img src="http://xxx/trackOpenRate.php?id='.$r.'">';
    mail($r, 'subject', $_content);
  }
}

Another question: If all 5000 subscribers are using Yahoo Mail, will Yahoo treat it as a DDOS attack and block the IP address of my SMTP server?

Answer 1

First off, using the mail() function that comes with PHP is not an optimal solution. It is easily marked as spammed, and you need to set up header to ensure that you are sending HTML emails correctly. As for whether the code snippet will work, it would, but I doubt you will get HTML code inside it correctly without specifying extra headers

I'll suggest you take a look at SwiftMailer, which has HTML support, support for different mime types and SMTP authentication (which is less likely to mark your mail as spam).