[Catalyst] Sending 3000 emails.

[Bob Miller]

Hi Andrew,

> You lot are all experts at Catalyst and Perl,

I am no expert in Catalyst or Perl, but I have learned a thing or two 
about email in my career.

I have found the best way for people to send butt-loads of emails to 
members is to use mailing list software.  This generally involves also 
running a mail server, so it's not a solution from within catalyst or 
perl, but it is almost certainly possible to have a catalyst app manage 
subscribing/unsubscribing/verifying users from a mailing list, and then 
when it comes time to send a mail to everybody, the app only needs to 
send a mail to one list address, and let the mail server do what it does 
best: send mail...

Just a suggestion...

> and because I'm using Perl to code a Catalyst program, I wanted to ask
> you about a problem I've encountered.
> The Catalyst app I'm coding is to replace a PHP website, which presently
> allows an admin to manage sending out an email to all members. The site
> has 3000 odd members. From what I could tell, the PHP code was simply
> using the PHP mail function to send email (although it did in my
> experience typically take two days for everyone to receive an email sent
> with it).
> I've also been asking other Perl programmers when I've had the chance -
> and the only concerns raised, were about IP blacklisting or emails
> bouncing back - not about actual code working.
> So could sending 3000 emails be as simple as Matt's old CGI form mail?
> I had a look on CPAN, and found the simple looking Email::Stuffer,
> and wrote a script, sending an email to myself, and it worked.
> I then modified the script to pick five email addresses from a MySQL
> database, and email them, and again - it worked.
> Okay - one final change - throwing 3000 email addresses at it.
> How does that do....?
> Starts to work - then throws up an Internal Server Error in the browser
> window,
> and I find out my Fast CGI Plack Up server thingie isn't up, nor running
> my Catalyst app anymore.
> I have to type plackup and my details, etc, again from the command prompt.
> A log in to Web Host Manager (this is an apache2 VPS with CPanel) and a
> check of the "View Sent Summary" shows 1020 emails sent - 611
> successful, 642 deferrals and 329 failures...curious, as that adds up to
> more than 1020, =S. If I click through for more details, it shows 1582
> records - some with green ticks, and others with amber or red
> exclamation marks, ^_^.
> I can worry about IPs and failure rates later....
> ....I just want to know why the whole FastCGI Plack loaded Catalyst app
> came down half way through,
> and how I can have a Perl script process sending 3000 emails without
> that happening every time, =S.
> Do I need to use a queue within Perl? Or does the postfix/sendmail on
> the server, automatically queue everything for me? If so - why did my
> code crash the Catalyst app, and not send all the emails? >_<.
> I'm guessing this is a common problem - how does a website email all its
> signed up members - and so there must surely be a common solution
> among Perl / Catalyst users....?
> Any help, appreciated!
> Yours,
> Andrew.
>
>
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