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PHP Mass emailing

Is sendmail designed to handle high volume of outgoing e-mail messages? If not, what are some of the open-sourced free mail servers for Linux that are commonly used for high volume delivery?

I'm looking for something that can send out 200k newsletter a day, and have library for PHP.

P/S: My website is on a dedicated server now. Currently I'm using cronjobs to send out 5k newsletters every 15 mins. This implementation is hitting its limit soon.

Now I wanted to split the mail server out into another dedicated server.

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Boon Kgim
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    First ask your hosting company :) – CodeAngry Oct 22 '12 at 13:12
  • You should consult your hosting provider on this. Anyway as a suggestion for reliable delivery you should look at [Amazon SES](http://aws.amazon.com/ses/). there are some php class available which will make your life ridiculously simple. – San Oct 22 '12 at 13:16
  • Hi Claudrian, I intended to setup a dedicated mail server. Currently my web server is able to send out 5k newsletters per 15 mins. It is almost at its limit but our subscribers base is still growing.So I am looking for a scalable solution. – Boon Kgim Oct 22 '12 at 13:18
  • Dear San, thanks for your reply. I actually considered Amazon SES before. But after some calculation, it doesn't seem to be cost-efficient. Thus, I'm looking for setting up a dedicated mail server myself but I'm rather new in this. – Boon Kgim Oct 22 '12 at 13:21
  • @Boon Kgim: I suggest you visit some sendmail forum and ask how to setup a mail server there instead. Most folks on this website here a programmers, not system administrators. I would not expect much guideline here, I'll add a duplicate. There are more, they probably help you to obtain some existing answers and the type of answers that are typically given. – hakre Oct 22 '12 at 13:32
  • @BoonKgim - the point of asking the hosting provider is not whether the system is capable, but whether the hosting provider would allow it. With all the spam going around, some hosts are nervous of people who send a lot of email, and if you don't discuss it with them they may shut it down without warning you. – SDC Oct 22 '12 at 14:10
  • @BoonKgim has a point. Also, it may be worth your time to check out a dedicated service for something like this, as high volume emails that aren't done correctly can easily get you black listed on the receiving end as well. You really have to dot all of your i's and cross your t's. – Joshua Kaiser Oct 22 '12 at 15:06

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The amount of newsletters you're about to send would require a couple of things:

  1. Server - most companies wouldn't allow you to send that amount of newsletters if you're using shared hosting. You'd probably need to get a VPS or Dedicated server with a lot of resources. I would suggest you having at least two. Also keep in mind your email server will be sending emails all the time and this will generate cpu/ram usage. So it'll be best if you use those servers only for sending the newsletters.
  2. DKIM key (due to the high amount of email you'll be sending daily your domain may get in spam filters)
  3. SPF records - needed to pass most spam filters.

When I had to do this, I had a quad core intel server with 4gb of ram. The amount of daily sent newsletters was around 35k. The server was specially optimized just for sending emails. The mail server was james mail server and I delayed mail sending - I had a daemon pooling about 15-25 emails per minute. That way the server load wasn't too high and I was able to bypass most spam filters. First I was using sendmail, but I started having problems with delivering some emails - they were being received a day or two after they were sent or they weren't received at all. I couldn't find out what was the problem so I switched to James Mail Server which handled the job great.

In my opinion you should focus your attention more on the server you'll be getting. You will need a lot of cpu, ram and network to be able to send ~200k newsletters daily. As for the email server - you need to try them and see which one works best for you. Plus, if you have a stable hosting infrastructure, you can easily change the mail server.

Also keep in mind you may need more than one server to be able to send those newsletters in time. If you want to send 200k emails for 24 hours, that means you'll need to send ~8333 emails per hour. That's a lot of cpu load. You may want to split jobs and have two,three or a botnet of server to handle the task fast.

I hope this helps.

P.S. Look at the post @hakre added as a comment. You should also consider using the services of MailChimp and other alternative companies who offer this kind of services.

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tftd
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I have recently switched over to use ElasticEmail (http://www.elasticemail.com) because i find their API very useful for certain apps, and their pricing is competitive. I have had good deliver-ability (once i set up SPF records) and reliability with them and have been on it about 4-5 months thus far. If you want to keep it in-house...you need a dedicated (VPS at least) server rather than a shared hosting plan. Talk to your hosting provider to see what their limits are. I hope this helps.

techtheatre
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