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phpemailprocessconventions

What is a good process/convention to use for something like transactional mail?

This is more of a discussion question but I would like to know what the best or a better process is for doing something like transactional mail.

Currently I am using a spooler service that runs on my server that gets run by a cron every 5 minutes to send the mails that exist in the queue. But this is too slow. I am talking about the process.

  1. Transactional mail (definition) : Emails, Texts that are sent to the user of the application for reminders, notifications, warnings, upgrade info etc.

The current process is something like this:

  • The application builds a mail object with the relevant information.

  • The mail then gets sent to the smtp server to as a mail file.(yes a whole file) to reside in a queue.

  • A cronjob runs over it to capture all the mail files and actually sends them off to a MTA server for sending.

    I think this process is a bit too complex and would like to hear anybody's thoughts on it. Notifications and reminders are better when they are instant is it not?

Regards

Solution

  • I have found a good application that does this:

    http://postmarkapp.com