NYCPHP Meetup

[matt at atopia.net]

Hi all,

I'm working on a website right now and am in charge of implementing email functionality. Multiple types of emails need to be sent, such as action emails (forgot password, new sign up, etc), and passive emails (cron runs every minute to see if something happened where it needs to email a user). 

At first, I thought about keeping active emailing inside the web code, and passive emailing inside a cron, but that doesn't allow for much control. My other idea was to use a listserv, and put all the emailing functionality in the web code, but have the management of those lists done in the background. 

My final option, which I like best, is to create an email queue table that can be populated in many ways. For instant actions, I can populate it with triggers, and for passive emails, I can populate it with a cron. Then, I have a single multi threaded perl script read from the queue and generate the emails, and then maintain the queue. 

Perhaps there is a better solution out there or something that does this already? I would love to use a system that already exists where I could just plug in the information and the "hooks". 

Thanks for any suggestions,

Matt