php mail(), 30 mails/week, once a week?

Gulastugan · **php mail(), 30 mails/week, once a week? -** 01-22-2009, 08:12 PM

Hi,

I want to create a webpage that once a week send out an email to the members there (app. 30 people) , triggered by the first person who enters the page every new week.

I've read here somewhere that there is an email limit of about 10 mail/minute, which make the function described above kind of difficult... Does anyone see a way for me to get around this limit? Is there a way for me to send only 10 emails a minute, 3 minutes in a row? The "ignore_user_abort" function is disabled here(I don't blame you for turning that one off...), so unless someone stays on the page for 3 minutes or more, all mails won't be sent

Any other options or ideas?

To sum things up, i want to send around 30 mails/week, once a week, is this possible?

Best regards,

Gula

sizzlefire · 01-22-2009, 08:18 PM

Well, unless you can split up the number of emails per minute, to about 10 per minute, then your only other option is to upgrade to our paid hosting.

doctorcolossus · 12:28 PM

[accidental double-post. please disregard]

doctorcolossus · 12:32 PM

The site I'm developing has various scripts which generate e-mails. For example, there's a registration script which sends a typical confirmation message to a new user's e-mail address; a forgotten password script to send them a temporary-access password; an RSVP script to alert an organizer when someone expresses interest in attending their event; and so on.

Although I do implement CAPTCHAs, I do worry that someone abusing these scripts, or even a short burst of unusually heavy activity, could cause me to exceed the limit of x number of messages per y interval of time. That's why I'm writing a function to prevent (and postpone) any further mail from being sent if too many messages have been sent in the past y interval.

My questions are these: is there such an official limit and, if so, what is it?

In the following three threads...
- Newsletter script vs. mass mailing?
- Clean Educational Site Closed for Abuse!!?
- Phpbb, image hosting, mass mailing
... people assert the limit is twenty e-mails per minute. Those threads all seem to be from mid-2008.

On the other hand, the thread we're in here and this one are slightly more recent (January and February of this year), and both contain claims that the limit is just ten e-mails per minute... and here that notion is put forth by the same sizzlefire who said it was twenty in this thread...

It's a pity, that inconsistency, because as far as I can tell, he/she is the only authoritative person to have cited figures about this. I didn't see any numbers given in the terms of service, as someone else suggested consulting.

So to clear the matter up, was the limit twenty/minute before, and was it later lowered to ten?; or is one of those two figures a mistake, and the other the correct one? Or does an official guideline exist at all?

I'm definitely not trying to create any mass-mail; on the contrary, I'm trying to make dead sure I obey set limits, and that's why I want to be sure of what they are!

Thank-you...

onegenius · 07-05-2009, 06:08 PM

You can pay for upgrade and remove limit.

doctorcolossus · 07-05-2009, 11:32 PM

onegenius: Thanks, I'm aware of that -- but it doesn't answer my question at all, which was what the limit is...

doctorcolossus · 07-08-2009, 09:33 PM

For anyone else wondering, I opened a support ticket to find the answer and they replied:

"You can send 20 messages per day."

This is kind of surprising. It's lucky that I apparently haven't exceeded it before during testing. I had thought that 20 messages per minute was quite high, and had planned to set my own limit quite a bit more stringently than that if it had been the correct figure. But 20 per day seems like a limit we should all be very conscious of. I'm glad I'm writing some code to handle this, because it's easy to imagine twenty legitimate e-mail notifications being sent out by my scripts someday when my site becomes more popular.

sizzlefire, I would be obliged if you could confirm this limit.

sizzlefire · 07-08-2009, 11:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by doctorcolossus

For anyone else wondering, I opened a support ticket to find the answer and they replied:

"You can send 20 messages per day."

This is kind of surprising. It's lucky that I apparently haven't exceeded it before during testing. I had thought that 20 messages per minute was quite high, and had planned to set my own limit quite a bit more stringently than that if it had been the correct figure. But 20 per day seems like a limit we should all be very conscious of. I'm glad I'm writing some code to handle this, because it's easy to imagine twenty legitimate e-mail notifications being sent out by my scripts someday when my site becomes more popular.

sizzlefire, I would be obliged if you could confirm this limit.

I have not heard of the limit being this before, I will ask our main admin next time I talk to him.

doctorcolossus · 07-08-2009, 11:15 PM

Greatly appreciated; thank-you!

doctorcolossus · 07-13-2009, 12:32 AM

It would also be helpful to find out what constitutes a day in this context -- 00:00:00 PST until 00:00:00 PST the next day? Or the current time, minus twenty-four hours?

For example, suppose I sent twelve messages between 20:00 and 23:00 PST, then nine more between 01:00 and 12:00 the next 'day'. That makes twenty-one messages, sent in a sixteen-hour span of time. Would it be OK, since the two time segments were on different calendar dates? Or would it violate the rule, since it was more than twenty messages in one twenty-four hour period?