I was wondering if there is a way to run a PHP loop in order to send a few hundred emails to subscribers in background. My goal is to format the newsletter, click send and then close the browser or change page. Of course, the actual process of sending the e-mail will be running in background and would not be interrupted by the browser closing.
I know this can be made with a cron job reading from a queue saved in MySQL or text file, but this way, even if there is no queue for a long period, the cron will always be running, looking for the queue…
I’ve seen this funcionality in a script called Pommo (https://github.com/soonick/poMMo) but can’t seem to understand how it’s done.
Does anyone have an idea for this?
I was going to add a comment to your question, but them I didn’t have enough space there to format and give the example.
Here is an idea I believe might work:
1 – Load all the emails you want to send to a database or file.
2 – From your web application click on the button to send emails. This will submit an Ajax request to the server. You can define the number of emails you want to send within a certain timeframe. Remember that most hosts have limits on number of emails you can send every hour.
3 – create a php script that will receive the Ajax request and send all the emails within the parameters you define.
4 – I believe you can kill your web browser because the PHP script will run through the whole list and will not return until it finishes sending all the emails.
The above might work, however I would never do it this way. I would use a cronjob as stated above. Your cronjob would only have to check if there are emails to send or not. This is not resource intensive.
If you decide to implement the ideas above, please make sure you let us know. I am curious if that would work.
Good luck!