PHP Mass emailing

Question

I work for a small marketing company that has asked me to develop a PHP application to send emails for their company without getting blacklisted or emails showing up as spam. I have a fairly good understanding of PHP (OOP) but I do not understand how to build this program. They need approximately 500,000 to 1,000,000 emails sent per month. They are ready to buy ip addresses, SMTP servers etc but I need to code the program to work. So basically what I'm asking is what is the breakdown of the different parts of an application like this needs and how it can function without being blacklisted or considered spam. I apologize if i confused anyone on this topic, its just that i used the mail() function numerous times and many of the mail keeps going to spam. This is a legitimate pharmaceutical company as far as i know, they just contacted me and asked me if i could do this so thats why im here to see if it is possible or not.

I know there are companies out there that can do this but they charge from $500 upwards and we cannot afford this. If there are specific equipment that needs to be bought we are ready to buy it to offset long term costs.

Any help is appreciated, thank you!

Answer 1

The best way to be not be considered as spam and not being blacklisted is to send legitimate emails.

There is no problem sending a lot of mails from the same IP if no recipient mark it as "spam" at the end. To achieve this, a lot of things have to be taken into consideration:

1. Having good lists with opt-in is not an option.
2. Track bounces (both soft and hard), so you don't send unnecessary emails (don't send again emails to hard bounces, try again sometimes for the soft bounces and remove them if successful).
3. Run spam tests before sending bulk (SpamAssasin, etc.) (no advertising, but Litmus does that)

In fact, if you do everything good, your IP can end up with a good sending reputation and more mails will get to the inbox. Also be aware that when sending bulk, not everybody gets the email at the end. Some of them are "lost" by different filters in the middle of the process.

If you never sent mail from an IP, try to be progressive and do not send 1 millions the same month. I advice you to be progressive on how many mail send 1 IP.

Look at what specialized companies do. For example, you can learn a lot from Campaign Monitor and MailChimp. They have really great blog and resources to look at. Follow their blog, keep informed.

Answer 2

A company I work with has had success using an Open Source (LGLP license) project called PHPMailer for a similar function -- maybe this would be a good start for you?

EDIT: PHPMailer is great software but I spoke too quickly. I meant to say phplist.

Answer 3

You're company is willing to buy hardware, but not pay $500 to have a company do it? For doing large mailings, you can use SwiftMailer. It has certain features to support bulk mailings and is written in PHP.

However, not getting blacklisted or put in the spam folder has nothing to do with hardware or software. You need a valid domain and valid emails. Put "V1agra" in an email an it probably won't get received by anyone, not matter what you are using.

Answer 4

If you are sending legit emails you should look into SPF.

Only validates an IP as valid sender of emails from a certain domain. Does not validate content or ensure safe passage through spamfilters. But since spam is illegal in many countries, this validation means they know who to sue/fine.

Answer 5

well, you may simply use mail() but no amount of PHP is going to help you get past spam filters. They use blacklists, statistical filters, human-filters, neural networks and all kinds of technologies to determine if someone is sending spam. 1.000.000 emails per month sounds like spam to me, so most likely you'll be tagged as "spammer" :)