How do I use PHP to create a mailing list?
April 26th, 2010 | 
Author: I have a database populated with email addresses and its all configured with php files and such on a webserver. What PHP commands do I use to read the emails from the database table and send an email to all of them at once?
Posted in Geek Central | 
Tags: configured, database table, email addresses, emails, php files, Send An Email, send email, Webserver
The most simple and barebones method of doing what you need done is through a couple php functions. You’ll want to run a MySQL query to create an object from your database that will hold all of the email addresses.
So you’ll want to connect and select the db first;
http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-connect.php
http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-select-db.php
And then run the query;
http://ca.php.net/mysql_query
Iterate through your query results and mail each of them;
http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php
It will look like this (Code starting):
// Connecting to the database
$db = mysql_connect(‘localhost’, ‘yourdbuser’, ‘yourdbpassword’);
if (!$db) die(mysql_error());
// Selecting the database table
$selectdb = mysql_select_db(‘yourdbname’, $db);
if (!$selectdb) die(mysql_error());
// Running the MySQL query
$results = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM yourtable);
// Pulling up the results and iterating through them
while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($results)) {
// Emailing each member
$to = $row->email;
$subject = ‘This is a test’;
$message = ‘This is a test’;
$headers = ‘From: youremail@example.com’ . "\r\n" .
‘X-Mailer: PHP/’ . phpversion();
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
}