Techniques, tools, best practices and tools to create a full blown bulk mailing application in PHP.

1. Sending Bulk Email Using PHP By Sudheer Satyanarayana http://techchorus.net

3. Tools and techniques

4. Best practices

5. Sample code

6. Question and answers

8. Outgoing emails restrictions set by hosting providers

9. Incoming email filters set by recipient servers and their users

10. Compliance - legal and tacit agreements

11. Avoiding getting blacklisted

14. Rackspace Cloud - 1.5¢ per hour / INR 0.7 per hour

16. Have correct reverse DNS record for your IP address

17. Have up to date contact information in WHOIS record

18. Monitor postmaster and abuse mailboxes

19. Have a consistent from header

20. Have SPF records

21. Sign messages using DKIM

23. Reverse DNS lookup maps IP address to a domain

24. Server hosting providers offer a way to set the reverse DNS entry in their control panels Example 31.41.51.61 pointing to myserver.example.com

25. Headers Email contains two major sections Header Header sections fields Example fields - From, To, Subject, Date, Message-Id Body Unstructured

26. Sample Email With Headers

28. PHPMailer

29. Swift Mailer

30. Zend_Mail Sample Usage Configure SMTP Before You Send. Use this snippet if SMTP authentication is not required $config = array ( 'name' => 'myserver.example.com' ) ; $transport = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp ( 'myserver.example.com' , $config ) ; Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp ( 'myserver.server.com' , $config ) ; Zend_Mail:: setDefaultTransport ( $transport ) ;

31. Zend_Mail Sample Usage Use this snippet if SMTP authentication is required $config = array ( 'auth' => 'login' , 'username' => 'myusername' , 'password' => 'password' ) ; $transport = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp ( 'myserver.server.com' , $config ) ; Zend_Mail:: setDefaultTransport ( $transport ) ;

32. Zend_Mail Sample Usage $mail = new Zend_Mail () ; $mail -> setBodyText ( 'Hello World!' ) ; $mail -> setFrom ( 'you@example.com' , 'You' ) ; $mail -> addTo ( 'me@example.com' , 'Me' ) ; $mail -> setSubject ( 'Greetings' ) ; $mail -> send () ; From, To, Subject headers are automatically set by Zend_Mail. Zend_Mail also handles MIME encoding.

34. Email Validation System

35. Have a text DNS record and publish your policy

36. Recipient servers validate sender by reading your DNS record SPF Example: "v=spf1 ip4:192.168.0.1/16 -all" Allow any IP address between 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.255.255. Use the SPF record generator http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html

38. A method for email authentication

39. Public key cryptography Example Header DKIM-Signature: d=example.com s=myserver b=MTI...I=;

41. Verify the subscriber's email address

42. Consider double opt in

43. Avoid purchasing lists

44. Send subscription reminders to users. Offer methods to unsubscirbe from the lists the user may no longer be interested in.

46. Do not force the user to fill in 'reason' field in the unsubscribe form field. Use unsubscribe form only for confirmation.

47. Provide a 'List-Unsubscribe' header

48. Automatically unsubscribe users whose addresses have reached a bounce threshold. Use VERP.

49. List Management - Unsubscribing List-Unsubscribe Header $mail = new Zend_Mail () ; $mail -> setBodyText ( 'Hello World!' ) ; $mail -> setFrom ( 'you@example.com' , 'You' ) ; $mail -> addTo ( 'me@example.com' , 'Me' ) ; $mail -> setSubject ( 'Greetings' ) ; $mail -> addHeader ( 'List-Unsubscribe', 'mylist-unsubscribe@my.example.com' ) ; $mail -> send () ;

50. List Management - Unsubscribing List-Unsubscribe Header With Unique Identifier $mail -> addHeader ( 'List-Unsubscribe', 'mylist-unsubscribe+myuniqueidentifier@my.example.com' ) ;

52. Return-Path header's value is usually same as From

53. Depends on your email server setting

54. When an email is bounced the details are sent to the email address specified in the Return-Path header Return-Path: me@my.example.com From: me@my.example.com

56. Automatic Bounce Handling

57. Make use of Return-Path header

58. Return-Path: me+specially_encoded_recipients_email@my.example.com

59. Server must support VERP

60. List Management - Unsubscribing Without VERP Return-Path: me@my.example.com With VERP Return-Path: me+you=you.example.com@my.example.com Use POP to fetch mails of me@my.example.com and parse the Return-Path header.

61. List Management - Unsubscribing Automatic Bounce Handling - VERP Fetching mail using POP $mail = new Zend_Mail_Storage_Pop3 ( array ( 'host' => 'localhost' , 'user' => 'test' , 'password' => 'test' )) ; foreach ($mail as $messageNumber=>$message) { $headers = $message->getHeaders(); $to = $headers['to']; //... }

63. If falsely flagged as SPAM, ask the users to flag the email as not SPAM

64. Use separate from email address for transactional emails and promotional emails

65. Use separate IP address for transactional emails and promotional emails

66. Use separate domains for transactional emails and promotional emails

68. Number of outgoing emails per hour per domain

69. List of blacklisted domains

70. Delay between outgoing emails

71. Process bounce handling every __ hours

72. Bounce treshold

74. Respond to user's complaints

75. Apply for whitelists when you have a problem Sample entities subscriber - email, preferred format, name list - name list_subscriber - lookup table. One subscriber can belong to many lists. message - subject, text body, HTML body message_queue - subscriber_id, message_id, list_id, sent, sent_time, unique_identifier

76. Thank You Contact - sudheer.s@sudheer.net http://techchorus.net http://projects.binaryvibes.co.in/projects/show/bare http://projects.binaryvibes.co.in/projects/show/bizsense http://binaryvibes.co.in

77. Licence Sending Bulk Email Using PHP by Sudheer Satyanarayana is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 India License . Based on a work at techchorus.net . Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://techchorus.net .