Short Like A Fox

So you want to send out a mass email or you want to create a program that can quickly be changed to send out multiple mass emails. PHP makes this easy. In this example I will assume that you have a list of email addresses you want to send a certain email to. I will also assume that you are keeping this list in a database, but this code could easily be adjusted to use either a hardcoded email address list or list from another source.

<?php

//First connect to the database that contains the email address information.
$user = "USER";
$host = "HOST";
$password = "PASSWORD";
$database = "DATABASE";

$cxn = mysql_connect($host, $user, $password) or die ("Couldn’t connect to server");
mysql_select_db($database);

//Query the table that contains the email addresses. Fill in your own table name here…
$query = "SELECT * FROM theEmailAddresses ";
$result = mysql_query($query, $cxn) or die (mysql_error($cxn));
$nrows = mysql_num_rows($result);

//Who the sender will be identified as. You can put what you want here, but it really isn’t too ethical to place an email address that you don’t control here.
$from = "From: me@mydomain.com";
//A standard email subject line
$subject = "What’s new at mydomain.com ";
//The message
$message = "Hi valued friend,

We now sell cookies at mydomain.com. Be sure to check it out!
Sincerely,
me";

//We’ve already queried all of the email address. Now we just need to send the email
for ($i = 0; $i <$nrows; $i++){

$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
extract($row);
//Replace $email with whatever the column of email addresses is called
$to = "$email";
//Send the email to each email in the database
if(mail($to, $subject, $message, $from)){

//Print the name of emails that were successfully sent. I use this just to make sure that the program hasn’t frozen. In theory their should be a steady stream of names being printed>

echo("$to<br/>");

}

}

?>

This bit of code takes advantage of the php mail() function. This is a very powerful and easy to use function. Remember that with great power comes great responsibility. Try not to use this function for evil.

If you have a website and want to tell where your users are coming from geographically PHP and PEAR make this possible. To turn a guest’s IP into a physical location the first thing you are going to need to do is make sure that you have the Net_Geo PEAR module. If you don’t have the Net_Geo PEAR module, you are going to have to use the PEAR Package Manager to acquire it.

If you don’t think that you have access to PEAR because of your hosting package, check out this explanation on how to install PEAR on an account that doesn’t allow access by default. It is written with GoDaddy shared accounts in mind, but should work for most hosting packages that don’t come with PEAR set up.

After you have Net_Geo package installed, it only takes a few lines of code to acquire geographical data:

<?php

require_once("Net/Geo.php");
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
//$ip = "64.246.30.37";
$firstNetGeo = new Net_Geo();
$geoData = $firstNetGeo->getRecord($ip);

?>

IP: <?php echo($ip); ?><br/>
Latitude: <?php echo($geoData['LAT']); ?><br/>
Longitude: <?php echo($geoData['LONG']); ?>
<br/>
Country: <?php echo($geoData['COUNTRY']); ?><br/>
State: <?php echo($geoData['STATE']); ?><br/>
City: <?php echo($geoData['CITY']); ?><br/>

 

The Code At Work:

IP: 38.107.191.112

Latitude:

Longitude:

Country:

State:

City: