format for manually constructing outgoing email text file

Ed Wilts ewilts at ewilts.org
Wed Jun 9 23:22:09 UTC 2004


On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 04:04:07PM -0700, Chris W. Parker wrote:
> i'm basically just writing a simple mailing list manager in php.

Is there a reason why you're writing your own mailing list manager when
there are good ones out there?

Writing a mailing list manager is *hard*.  Handling bounces is *hard*.
Have you looked at mailman to see if it would do the job for you?  I've
seen way too many bad implementations of mailing list managers and the
results are usually very bad - inefficient or no spooling, bad bounce
handling (or worse, no bounce handling at all), and an inability to do
proper logging.  Remember that with today's anti-spam laws, the onus is
on you to ensure that the people who are on the list are supposed to be
there and that they haven't asked you to leave them alone.  

> ultimately i want to be able to send emails to any number of recipients
> in my database. 

You can easily synchronize the list from the database with the internal
lists that mailman uses (sync_members).

"Any number" could be  large number.  Writing your own mailing list
manager for more than a handfull of users is going to overwhelm you (or
you'll more than likely get it wrong).

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program





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