Question

I have a (PHP) script which runs on a new row in MySQL. However, it will continually send the emails, even if they’ve already been sent…causing mass emails into the users Inbox.

The script is quite big, so I cant paste it here – http://pastebin.com/6v75F4Gv

Is there anyway I can somehow check if this script has already sent ‘xx’ email, but if a new row containing ‘zz’ and the user has specified they wish to receive content containing ‘zz’ it sends the ‘zz’ row?

ie. It stops duplicate/etc. emails.

Note: MySQL table is in the following format:
Table: feed
Rows in pager: id, title, description, date

Table: recipients
Rows in recipients: id, email, suburb

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

Neither of your tables has a column to log if the email has been sent, which is what I’d expect to see happen here:

if (sendMail($subject, $to, $body, $from, $cc))
{
   echo 'Mail for ' . $to . ' has been sent.<br />';

   //Update database so only one email is sent...
   $sql = "INSERT INTO TRACKING_TABLE 
              (feed_id, recipient_id, isSent)
           VALUES
              ($feed_id, $recip_id, 'Y')";
   $query = mysql_query($sql);
} else
{  ...

…which would mean updating:

$feed_sql = "SELECT id, title, description, rssDate 
               FROM feed 
              WHERE MATCH (title) AGAINST ('" . $rows['suburb'] . "') 
                AND NOT EXISTS(SELECT NULL
                                 FROM TRACKING_TABLE tt
                                WHERE tt.feed_id = feed.id
                                  AND tt.recipient_id = $Recipient_id
                                  AND tt.issent = 'Y')
           GROUP BY pubDate 
           ORDER BY pubDate DESC 
              LIMIT 1";

…to be sure that your query isn’t picking up those that have been successfully sent.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `example`.`tracking_table`;
CREATE TABLE  `example`.`tracking_table` (
  `feed_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `recipient_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  `issent` char(1) NOT NULL default '',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`feed_id`,`recipient_id`),
  FOREIGN KEY (feed_id) REFERENCES pager(id),
  FOREIGN KEY (recipient_id) REFERENCES recipients(id)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;