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How to test/mimic the sending of very large volumes of email?

What's the best way to test the sending of large volumes of email? I run a newsletter site for a client and as the database has grown to over 40,000 emails I'd like to be able to do test runs of sending that many emails without actually sending that many emails. Also, I've seen some email newsletter/marketing websites that claim to have a verifiable 98% delivery rate. How do they verify that? I think it's done by a third party. Do they run through test mailings by sending to the third party verifier? Finally, what's an average length of time you would expect for sending/delivery of 40,000 plus emails?

Thanks.

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Kshitij Ahuja

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tprpics

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ndcbizman

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My apologies. I suppose I should have given more information. We've been doing this for a while and have encountered and solved many problems along the way (server limits, missing bounces, sent mails that vanish in cyber land, ...) all the while trying to maintain a clean mailing list so as not to get blacklisted.

We do track opens but my understanding was that the claimed 98% delivery rate I mentioned was delivery, even if the recipient never opened it. Is it possible to verify that?

We are also on our own server now so we have no hourly sending limit. I am also aware that I if send too much to Yahoo (or some other domain) all at once they will probably start rejecting some as spam.

Our sending process runs pretty well but it seems a little slow to me. I am of course in the process of tweaking the code to eliminate any bottlenecks on my end but was looking for a way to test a large volume of mail. I've tested batches of up to 1000 by replacing emails with one of my own email addresses but I'm hesitant to do too much of this for obvious reasons.

I could quite easily test the process that builds the newsletter and just skip the call to the mail function each time it loops through but this only tests the code on my end and leaves out the most important function.

For any PHP coders that have coded such a function for sending large volumes of email, do you find the mail() function satisfactory or have you had better luck with smtp? And, beyond testing in small batches, how did you test the script and verify delivery rates?

Thanks.