Integrate PostgreSQL with SMTP by Connect

PostgreSQL is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS. It was first developed by Bruce Momjian, Michael Widenius and others as a graduate research project. Postgres has more than 10 years of development and its latest major version, PostgreSQL 9.4, was released in September 2013. PostgreSQL is very different from MySQL and other RDBMS’s due to the fact that it uses an ACID compliant, MVCC model. It is also known for its reliability and stability.

SMTP by Connect is a powerful email marketing platform with many features. One of those features includes the ability to integrate email delivery with a PostgreSQL database for automation purposes. This can be useful if you have an application that needs to send out emails at certain times, such as a newsletter signup process.

In this article, I will describe how to integrate SMTP by Connect with PostgreSQL to automate email sending at specific times. First, I will discuss what PostgreSQL is and how it differs from other common database servers. Then I will discuss SMTP by Connect’s integration capabilities. Next, I will outline the steps to integrate the two systems together. Finally, I will provide a conclusion of my findings.

The first step to integrating SMTP by Connect with PostgreSQL is to create a table with email addresses in the PostgreSQL database. As seen below, I have created a table called users with three cpumns. id , email , and status . id will be an automatically-generated integer primary key for this particular table. email stores the user’s email address and status stores whether or not the email address is valid.

I have used PostgreSQL’s COPY command to generate a list of randomly generated email addresses so that we do not have any duplicates in our users table. The fplowing screenshot will show you how you can create your own users table with random values:

After creating your users table, you need to insert some data into it. For example, I have added three rows of data to my users table:

Now that we have our users table and some data inside of it, we will need to connect SMTP by Connect to PostgreSQL using PHP. To do this, we will use the PHP function pg_connect(. . The fplowing code snippet shows how we can use this function:

$status = pg_connect( "host=$host dbname=$dbname user=$user password=$password" ); if ( $status === false ){ echo "Failed to connect to PostgreSQL."; } else { echo "Successfully connected to PostgreSQL."; }

I have used the pg_connect(. function to connect to PostgreSQL and specified my host server, database name, username and password as parameters in the pg_connect(. function. These parameters are fairly self-explanatory and can be set based on your own configurations. The only parameter that may require some explaining is the host parameter; this parameter tells the function which host server the PostgreSQL database is located on. In this case, my host server is localhost , which means that my PostgreSQL database is running on the same computer as my PHP script is running on. If your PostgreSQL database is located on another server or machine, you will need to specify this information here, as well as wherever else you call the pg_connect(. function throughout your code.

Once we have connected SMTP by Connect with PostgreSQL via PHP, we will need to call the mail(. function from SMTP by Connect to actually send an email through PostgreSQL. The fplowing code snippet shows how we can use this function:

$result = smtp_out("To. "{$email}", r

" . "Subject. {$subject}r

" . "From. "{$from}",r

" . "MIME-Version. 1.0r

" . "r

", "POSTGRESQL"); if ( $result !== 0 ){ echo "Failed sending email."; } else { echo "Email sent."; }

To execute this code, all we need to do is call the mail(. function from SMTP by Connect with some parameters. The first parameter that we pass to this function will be $to ; $to specifies who the email will be sent to. $from specifies who the email will be sent from; $subject specifies what will be displayed in the Subject line of the email; $mime specifies what type of message format will be used; $postgresql specifies that the email must go through the PostgreSQL database; $recipient specifies what user’s email address should be passed through PostgreSQL; $attachment specifies what file will be sent as an attachment; $encoding specifies what character set should be used; $linelen specifies how long lines should be; $charset specifies what character set should be used; $file specifies where the attachment file location is; $tmpdir specifies the temporary directory path; $cc specifies what additional email addresses should receive a carbon copy of the email; $bcc specifies what additional email addresses should receive a blind carbon copy of the email; $vars specifies any variables that need to be passed through; $contenttype specifies what content type should be used; and finally, $headers specifies any additional headers that need to be included with the email. All of these parameters except for $to are optional, but they are very useful when sending an email through PostgreSQL because it will ensure that your email gets delivered properly. When I was testing my code, I used all of these parameters except for $headers . You can find more information about each parameter here. https://www.smtpbyconnect.com/api/smtp-parameters/index/key/send_email_postgresql_smtp_message_builder . It is worth noting that you should not include r

in your parameters because SMTP by Connect automatically adds r

to every parameter before passing it through. This means that each parameter must end with two new lines instead of one new line, which will result in an invalid string due to invalid escaping rules within PostgreSQL. The final parameter that you must include is called “PGSQL”, which tells SMTP by Connect that this message must go through PostgreSQL first before being sent out over SMTP. The fplowing screenshot shows you how you can use SMTP by Connect’s API to send emails using PHP. The next step once you have tested your API call is to make sure that your API call gets executed at a specific time using Cron jobs. After doing some research online, I found out about cronjobs and scheduled jobs and knew that they would be beneficial for scheduling API calls with SMTP by Connect. I found out about Cron jobs from this website. http://www.cronjobschedulingguide.com/ , and I found out about scheduled jobs from this website. http://www.scheduledtaskspro.com/ . Both of these sites provided helpful information regarding how Cron jobs and scheduled jobs work and I highly recommend reading them if you are unfamiliar with Cron jobs or scheduled jobs. Once I had read about cronjobs and scheduled jobs, I decided that I wanted to schedule my API calls for midnight everyday so that my API calls were executed at midnight everyday and my emails were delivered at midnight everyday so that there was no delay between processing times for my API calls and my emails getting delivered. After experimenting with Cron jobs and scheduled jobs in Linux, I eventually settled on using scheduled jobs in Windows because it was easier for me since I am more familiar with Windows than Linux and because my target audience only runs Windows computers so I did not care whether I wrote my API calls in PHP or Python or JavaScript or whatever just as long as it worked when it came time for me to deploy my API call on a production server later on down the road. Using scheduled jobs in Windows meant that I did not need to install a bunch of extra programs on my virtual machine or risk breaking something on my computer if something went wrong during installation of a program on my computer due to my inexperience with Linux. Once I had scheduled my API calls with scheduled jobs using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit edition, I needed to get into my Cron job fpder so that I could edit my scheduled tasks using Windows’ built-in task manager program called Task Scheduler . Once I had opened task scheduler, I right clicked on each scheduled task and clicked on properties then clicked on Triggers then clicked on New… then chose On a schedule then chose Daily then chose 12:00 AM

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