Sending a large number of emails

[eluser]PhilTem[/eluser]
It really sounds like a reasonable approach - I thought of pushing you towards using cronjobs as I was about to reading the 5th paragraph. But then you mentioned it yourself.

Anyway, you don't need to have a snippet of PHP script in your database. I had a similar task to accomplish in a project one year ago and ever since then I'm using the same code for other projects. Let me just tell you my experience and talk a little about my business logic:

First of all you're right, you will want to use cronjobs to send out so many emails since you might end up with exceeding the maximum execution time for a PHP script if you wanted to use either PHP's mail() or CI's email library. The problem however, you need root access to your server in order to install a cronjob that's run under the webserver's username. But that shouldn't be a problem here.

What you would put in your crontab file can be of two different kinds:
- Either put a call to the PHP CLI (command line input) and refer to the CI user's guide on how to use the CLI
- Put a "wget http://www.example.com/controller/method/args" in it
I'm usually going with the second one since I can store the output in a nicer way to a custom log file.

Now, since we will basically be making a simple GET-Request to some controller of our page, we need to create this.

How you create it doesn't matter, it should just grab the recipients from a database, grab the content of the mail from your database and mix it together to make an email. Then you can loop over e.g. 10 recipients per call to your cron-controller and you want put too much load on your system.

If you want to have a look at my controller, have a look here (Right now I'm too lazy to write more in here, but you can hopefully understand a bit from my code).
The libraries and models used for it can be found inside the same module by just browsing to the corresponding folder

I had very good experiences with this setup however it was a little bit difficult setting up the cronjob correctly and without any errors. But that was due to not knowing how to use cronjobs

For any questions just post here or contact me at philipp (at) ignitedco (dot) de