I have a newsletter, and I have more than 2500 users registered for it. What's the best server-side way to send this huge amount of mails, fast and well.. to every single of them? Thanks, I'll green rep!
2500 is a very small number and can be handled by practically any mail system. I would recommend Postfix on a Linux system, but Sendmail (usually the default) will work just fine. If you're looking for mailing list software to distribute this as opposed to mail server software, maybe look at Mailman. But as I said, pretty much anything you use will be able to handle it fine. I've used Postfix to send newsletters to 2 million subscribers.
I just have a shared hosting account, with cPanel access, MailMan can be installed as a regular php script?
2500 users can be handled easily by sendmail. Mailamn is in cPanel by default. Dont know as regular php script.
Ask your provider regarding mass mailing before you send any because they might just kill your account if you overload their servers.
My sendmail .php script is giving me an error, even though it sends. I guess it's related to the php.ini, do you know of any additional php.ini setup before processing 2500 mail()'s ?
If you can use Perl/CGI and MySQL I suggest the CWT Newsletter Pro script from my script store. The script is installed on your server and has an easy to use admin panel. You can add all your subscribers emails at once and then send text or HTML emails to all of them at the click of a button. It also stores a log of the newsletters sent and displays them in HTML for people to view if they didn't recieve it. That can be turend on or off and can be SEO friendly. Here is the product page http://cgiwebtools.com/index.cgi?action=products&id=3
It depends upon your host. Often hosts will have a script in place to prevent sending more than X amount of mails per hour. Check with your host on the best way to proceed.
most responsible hosts set a limit on how many messages can be sent - the amount varies between hosts so it is best to ask your host these details. Seriously, if your host does not have these limits in place it is not a good host to be with! 2500 messages is not huge at all and the mail server can easily handle sending 2500 messages - it would only take a minute or 2 to process.
Most hosts would not care about a 2500 email run. However, they *will* care if they start getting abuse reports or if the ip gets blacklisted. Spamhaus goes so far as to blacklist all domains being served by the same DNS server as the offending domain. A guilt by association thing. Not fair, but then ... .
any sensible shared host would have set max 500-700 outgoing mails per hour for an account. Queue is run every 60 minutes, you just need an nice script