title: Personalised bulk email programmatically without timing out
body: <p>I have a list of around 5,000 to 10,000 (individual user supplied) email addresses from people all over the world, each associated with their username and language codes. I also have a single message translated into the different languages of the users that I want to email. Now, I would like to send a single plain text email to each of the address, with the actual text of the email varying based on the user language, and personalised with the username of the person I'm emailing.</p>
  
  <p>Because of the personalised requirement, and the fact that they will only be emailed once (per year or two with a overlapped but different user list), formal mailing list is probably (&amp; preferably) out. 3rd party bulk email service is also out.</p>
  
  <p>Ignoring programming time, what is the least manually time consuming way to do this in (preferably) PHP? (I am writing the script(s), but not necessarily the person that end up "pressing the button" to send it.) The ideal result is the person sending only having to type a single command to run the script (supplying the email list) and all the email will be sent with no more user intervention. This mean I am looking to avoid things like setting up cron jobs to run the script repeatedly until the email list is exhausted. </p>
  
  <p>When this was done before a year ago, I wrote a PHP script that simply read in the email list line by line processing the username, email address, and language code and build the desired email text out of that before supplying it to PHPMailer to send individually. The problem I had was the script timing out and me not knowing where it got up to so that I can trim the email list at the right place to start again. I ended up manually splitting up the 1 email list into several sub-list that was short enough so that the script doesn't time out. How do I either avoid timing out, or keep track of where the script is up to email address wise so that it can be restarted manually and no person is sent emails more than once?</p>
  
  <p>What other issues are there to take into account, such as avoiding blacklisting etc.?</p>