[drupal-devel] [wanted] mail queue

[Dries Buytaert]

On 17 Aug 2005, at 12:38, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
>>> BTW: The fact that massmailer was so buggy seems to indicate that  
>>> the
>>> demand for massmailing beyond user_mail()'s capabilities is maybe
>>> overestimated. ;->
>>>
>>
>> I think rather that it is more complex and therefore not  
>> accessible to
>> hobby Drupalists.
>
> True massmailing (as in tens of thousands of mails) will _never_ be
> available to hobby Drupalists with el cheapo hosting.
>
> Why?
>
> - technical difficulties
> - any sane webhoster will deny sending mass mails to cheap  
> customers for
>   fear of getting blacklisted.
>
> And if you just need to send a few hundred mails, you probably will do
> fine with user_mail() and a cronjob.

True, and that is probably what the default/initial backend should  
look like.  Right now, all these modules implement their own "cronjob  
+ user_mail" function.  Let's make this available as a service.  In  
addition we could provide a centralized way of dealing with HTML  
mail, a mechanism to throttle the rate of outgoing e-mails, a  
mechanism to convert HTML mails to plain text, and - in future -  
maybe a mechanism to track and report back bounces.

As you said, proper mailing is hard.  Hence the need to make this a  
specialized service and to extract this from the individual modules.   
Hence my call for people with experience, or for people willing to  
learn more about this.  I don't expect this to be implemented  
overnight, but it would be nice if some people could explore our  
options, see what other projects have done, prototype some code, etc.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/