Is there any way send out a specific number of newsletters per hour?

[bryanb3]

Hello:

Is there any way to send out say 400 newsletters per hour out of Zen Cart instead of sending all at once?

My host restricts sending emails to 500 per hour.

Sincerely,
Bryan
www.profitmart101.com

[DrByte]

At the present time there is no built-in way of throttling the number of outbound emails.
You'd need an external tool to do that, such as the one I discuss here: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...150#post216150

[swguy]

At some point it may make sense to get a separate email service provider to handle your bulk mail needs so you don't get in trouble with your host. I recommend MailChimp, but many people have good experiences with Constant Contact or AWeber.

[bryanb3]

Thanks for all the help.

Sincerely,
Bryan
www.profitmart101.com

[brushwoodnursery]

For regular newsletters, my vote is for phplist. I found this thread because I'm researching a way to throttle back product notifications. I restock in big batches due to the nature of my business. Right now, I'm about to send a batch but I wanted to know if adding

sleep(x) 

into the loop would manually slow things. I don't care if it takes all night to process the notifications. I just don't want to anger the customers' hosts and get blocked.

[npn2531]

Yes, there is. I have written a program for Zen Cart that I have used for about a couple of months that sits in the Newsletter Manager, and will send out 1 newsletter (email) per X seconds to either all customers or to newsletter subscribers. X can be whatever you like. If X is 8 it sends out 480 emails per hour, perfect for shared host websites. I have added a counter to it, so you can watch it's progress. It's pretty easy to install. The best part is that it pulls directly out the database, eliminating the need to maintain a separate database for emailing or for creating newsletters in an outside program. If there was an interest in this program I will post it as a contribution, as I would very much like to see how more experienced programmers could improve on it.

I regularly have been using it to send out to my list of about 6000, and it seems pretty bullet proof. However, if there was a way to add processing of bounced emails and other features like that it could approach being a full featured bulk email program that sits right in Zen Cart