Improve mass mailing

[Pilot]

When I mass mail all users, a number of the Email addresses are invalid - therefore the "sendmail" takes a long time for these users - making the whole process (for 6000 users) take well over an hour.

It would be nice if the script could detect these failures to send the mail successfully and set a flag in the user record. This would allow review of these users, correction of their Email addresses or even deletion of these users.

At present the script always returns "sending....ok" for each user even though some of them are totally invalid. Why is this?

[Fusion]

Let's wait and see what improvements v3 will bring. I know some changes have been discussed in the area.

[Wayne Luke]

It doesn't mark them as invalid because it doesn't get feedback from Sendmail.

In vb3.0, all the mail functionality has been changed to reference a single function. This will allow you to customize the mail features using your mail server as well as build in HTML email and other nice features if you want.

[Pilot]

Even without feedback, the elapsed time could be measured and any "sendmail" that takes more than "n" seconds could result in the member record being flagged for review.

[Wayne Luke]

It could but have you looked at vBulletin's mail functionality as present? There is no ability to do that since PHP handles all the mail. It doesn't return that kind of information.

[Pilot]

Can't you sample the current time before calling the mail function and again after it, and calculate the difference?