Personalized emails with SendMail

Elliott has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

A client has asked us to set up a personalised opt-in mailing system on a remotely-hosted web server. We are confident there are no spam issues here, however I am concerned about the technical side.

1. The only way I know to generate personalised emails from Perl is to launch a separate copy of SendMail for each mail. The last thing I want to do is bring down the server by launching 1000+ copies simultaneously. Is there a way to achieve our objective that avoids this risk?

2. Am I right in thinking that once a Perl script is launched from a web client, the client must stay connected for the script to continue? I am concerned about the usability of a system that requires someone to wait at a computer screen until a possibly lengthy process is complete. This would be especially so if the solution to Q1 is to intersperse sleep commands between small batches of emails. Any ideas?

I did a search of the archives before posting this question and ended up downloading Mail::Bulkmail. I think maybe it is the answer, but I couldn't understand whether, in MailMerge mode, it still suffers from the same problem or not.

Comment on Personalized emails with SendMail

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Re: Personalized emails with SendMail by davorg (Chancellor) on Oct 08, 2001 at 14:44 UTC
You might like to look into the "-odq" option for sendmail. This queues the email for delivery later and therefore stops your script from hanging whilst thousands of emails are send. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."	[reply]
Re: Re: Personalized emails with SendMail by Elliott (Pilgrim) on Oct 08, 2001 at 15:37 UTC
That looks like it would solve both problems: neither keeping the user waiting nor flooding the server with forked processes. Have I understood correctly? (I love this place! Where else on the planet can one ask such esoteric questions and get answers that are not only instant but right!?!?! Thank you.)	[reply]
Re: Personalized emails with SendMail by tachyon (Chancellor) on Oct 08, 2001 at 15:27 UTC
To expand on davorgs accurate '-odq' suggestion here is a bit of code cut out of a script: `$mail_prog = '/usr/sbin/sendmail'; # to enable mail queueing for sendmail set this to '-odq' (set to '' f +or no queue) # warning -odq option needs to be configured or messages will never +be delivered! my $odq = '-odq'; open ('MAIL', "\|$mail_prog -t -i $odq") or DieNice("Can't open mail pr +ogram '$mail_prog': $!\n"); print MAIL $message; close MAIL;` [download] cheers tachyon s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Personalized emails with SendMail by jj808 (Hermit) on Oct 08, 2001 at 14:50 UTC
Have a look at these nodes: Running a process in the background from CGI scripts..., How do you tell the parent process to stop it's HTTP transfer, when it forks off a child process?, and forking from web for information on forking processes from your CGI script. Cheers, JJ	[reply]
Re: Personalized emails with SendMail by ronzomckelvey (Acolyte) on Oct 24, 2001 at 08:46 UTC
Hi- Why not take your messages and put them in a queue, flat file or mysql db, then have one or a few background jobs that doing nothing but loop, process mail, sleep to do all the sending. In your queue file you would know what personalised setting to use and etc. I do the same thing, kinda, I take interface files from the as/400, make either pdf's or excel spreadsheets, then email them to vendors and such. I use Mail::Sender and not have to rely on sendmail. ronzo	[reply]