Hi, I'm not sure this is the right list to post this, and i'm not even sure if there is already a solution to this problem, in which case, sorry...
Ok, my problem: PHP has (as you all know) a mail() function which is very handy to send mail to people. Now, with the advent and subsequent ease of MySQL into the picture, anyone who have a bit of time on their hands and a table filled wiith e-mail addresses, can easily write a loop sending bulk mail or spam to thousands of users listed in the table. The problem with this as you might know, is that the mail() function seems to invoke a new sendmail process (on Unix boxes) for each mail() call, meaning that you can very quickly crash your sendmail if you have a fast enough server and a large enough list of addresses in the table. I know that using php to send so much mail is not the right answer, but there are people out there who DON'T know this, and are using this method, or at least trying to, causing great headaches to many administrators, as there is no way of preventing someone (barring a full on removal of the user's rights) from doing so again and again. Now, my question is, isn't it possible to re-write the mail function to instead of treating each call to the mail function as a separate event, to rather see it as a "global event", ie., when called, it will always assume that more is coming until it gets a "finished" call. This way, surely, it should be possible to have the entire batch sent directly to the mail queue instead of trying to send the messages immediately as it comes in, thereby clogging sendmail and causing it to shut down... Unfortunately, I am not a programmer, so I would not be able to help much when it comes to doing this, but maybe the guys working on the code could look into this? Like I said, I am not sure if there might already be another way of solving this (not third party solutions like mailling list managers...) but if there is, and someone reading this and knows of one, please post me the solution! I really need to know that a single user on one of my websites cannot cause the entire systems mail to clog. Thanks alot, and keep up the good work, PHP is still the best! Petre Agenbag South Africa -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
