What will happen to these emails?

[ebaobao]

Hello,
I created a newsletter and I'm about to send. I have 500 customers I'm sending to, but my host says that I'm only able to send out 150 mails/hour. My question is what happens when I go ahead and select in the zen cart admin to send the newsletter to the 500 newsletter registered customers? Will all of the emails after the 150 mails get bounced? Since there are no timer settings in zen cart to set the amount of emails being sent what will happen to those emails?
Thanks.

[ebaobao]

Hello All,
I've been trying out the newsletter in zen cart admin and would like to give some information on how it works and what I think. I don't know everything about it, but I will give you my experience with the good and the bad things that I have run into. It may save you lots of time by reading this to get a general idea of what the newsletter manager does in zen cart admin.

Good Stuff
1. You can create html and text newsletters easily. Especially using the tool interface (this eliminates hardcoding html). Just insert a few tables, pics, and text and you are good to go.
2. Linking pictures to webpages is also very easy.
3. If you want to hardcode, you can switch to hardcoding as well.
4. When you send, zen gives you a list to pick from to send (very helpful).
5. Zen will send html newsletter to those who subscribe html and text to those who subscribe text automatically(for each newsletter you should create a html version and text version of course).
6. The header logo is nicely attached to each newsletter and when the recipient receives their email, it will say "Dear <firstname> <lastname>".

So basically getting the newsletter created is quite simple. And doing a test send works out well. Now for the Bad Stuff

Bad Stuff
1. The newsletter manager doesn't have an option for you to do a test send. Yes, they can test send to the admin, but having to switch the admin received email format HTML to TEXT or back gets tiresome. A simple test send email field and radio button for html or text would solve this problem.
2. If you have a email list that is beyond what your host server allows for outgoing email, then you can't even use this tool at all. Because any mails you try to send beyond their limit will get dropped or bounced. My host gives me a 500/hr limit.
3. Zen doesn't have any sort of timer setting for the newsletter to set a certain amount of emails to go out every hour, etc. This feature would have been great (It just tries to send everyone on the list at one time, this may of course cause timeouts if you have a huge list).

So now I'm trying to look for ways to do my newsletters easily.
1. One option came to mind is change the code so that, the email list gets broken off to several list. Of course this will still require you to manually send those list every hour. Also, I'm thinking this may require quite a bit of code changing. Do you guys think this is doable?
2. I'm trying to use the Export Email mod from Dr. Byte and the free Groupmail program to do the sending, but the free version only allows you to import the Email address from a file and not anything else. Thus you won't be able to have "Dear <firstname> <lastname>" in your email. On top of that, I'm not sure how to tell Groupmail to send HTML or TEXT to which customers. This problem is making me think of removing the TEXT option entirely when they sign up for an account.

So, I was wondering what newsletter programs you guys are using that easily integrates with zen cart. Are any of you actually using the default zen cart newsletter manager admin?

[daneh]

I can't answer your question, but have you considered mailchimp for your newsletters? I recently switched because of a similar reason, and love mailchimp.
There is even a mailchimp mod in the download area, graciously contributed by the software guy.