MySQL backend for mailing list

[Mike]

Hi there,

I'm making a library website where users can store preferences about the
types of books/cds/etc... they like (e.g. romance, rock, cooking, etc....).
Once a month the list of 'New Releases' is updated. Currently there is a New
Release box which shows releases based on the users preferences.

What I'd like to do is extend it to offer email functionality. Send out an
email once a month, if they wish, with information about titles relevant to
them. I know it would be a fairly trivial issue to send out a static email
to all the subscribers so everyone gets the same content. What I'd like to
do is email each user a list of new titles based on their preferences
(stored in a MySQL). I've already made a MySQL query to extract the preferences.
I'm estimating a maximum of about 8-10,000 users would use the service
(We have about 100,000 members in total).

We were going to use MS SQL which had some built in email functionality but
we moved over to open source and now I'm trying to find an alternative way.
The site will be on a shared webserver (And I only have FTP access) and the
large number of emails means I can't just just send them all using PHP --
I'm assuming it'd just take far too long.

I'm considering sending the emails out over a period of time each month to
reduce the load, e.g. A-H surnames at 11pm, I-M surnames midnight, M-Z
surnames at 1am or something like that. The other method, probably more of a
final resort, would be to make a PHP script to output (what will be) the
emails to a browser, download the file, have a seperate program actually
send the emails -- however I suspect this too might take up too much of PHPs
time, and too much bandwidth.

Has anyone tried to do something like this before, what did you end up
using, etc...?

Cheers,

Mike.

mysql , query


p.s. sorry for this second post, my last one only ever appeared in the newsgroups and not in the mailing list archives so I think it might have been flagged as spam.


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