Cannot send email to customers anymore (admin problem)

[Princess]

Hi,

I have version 1.3.9 of Zen-Cart. Since a while I cannot send customers an newsletter or email anymore in the Admin.
What happens is that:
- with newletters, I can make the newsletter, but when I click at the Send-button nothing happens, the page is loading but after a while it just stopt and you see a blank page.
- with email: I just cannot load the page where I can send an email to customers (the page is also loading and stops also after a while with showing an empty blank page)

I have made a copy of my webstore to try some things. I am busy loading the database from the webstore to see after what tables I cannot send the email or newsletters anymore. The customer-tables went ok, after that I still could send email or newsletter. But after loading the order-tables I could not use the email or newletter option anymore.

Does someone have a clue about what to do to solve this?

[DrByte]

Admin->Configuration->Email Options->Audience-Select Count Display -- turn it off as that might be what's timing out.

[Princess]

Hi DrByte,

Thank you for your fast reply, I have turned it off, but I still have the same problem..

[DrByte]

How many customers in your store? 500 or 5000000?

[Princess]

Hi DrByte

I have 3163 costumers.. If I transport the orders table from my working webstore to my test web then the problems begin, is there maybe a way to delete old orders from this file? I am afraid that this file became too big...

[Princess]

Hi DrByte,

If I only import the customer tables or only import the order tables from my webstore nothing went wrong, but the combination of importing order tables and customer tables went wrong, I am afraid that alle files are too large.

customers Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 3.151 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 639,4 KB -
customers_basket Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 1.037 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 89,7 KB -
customers_basket_attributes Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 770 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 98,1 KB -
customers_info Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 3.151 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 146,9 KB -
customers_wishlist Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 0 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 1,0 KB -


orders Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 5.417 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 2,3 MB -
orders_products Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 10.870 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 1,4 MB -
orders_products_attributes Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 9.208 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 1,4 MB -
orders_products_download Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 0 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 1,0 KB -
orders_status Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 8 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 3,2 KB -
orders_status_history Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 7.189 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 622,1 KB -
orders_total Verkennen Structuur Zoeken Invoegen Legen Verwijderen 16.297 MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci 1,6 MB

[DrByte]

I don't understand. Why are you importing customers and orders?

[Princess]

I made a copy of my webstore to see where the problem lies. After copying the databasefiles customers and orders then I could not use the email or newspaperfunction of the admin anymore.. These files are too large, I have deleted now a few years of orders, and now I can use these functions anymore, but it still takes a couple of minutes before it loads.. The orders table and the orders_total table are now a lot of smaller, but I do not know how to make all the other order-tables smaller, expecially the order_products table is extemely large..

[DrByte]

You don't need to prune your "orders" or orders_total, or any other order-related tables because of email problems.

[DrByte]

The "send email" screen and the "send newsletter" screen are set to pull up a list of customers via a pulldown menu. That list is pulled from your customers table. When you have so many customers that there's not enough RAM on the server or in your browser to handle all their addresses being shown, you get the timeouts that you described in your earlier post.

When you have thousands of customers it's really best to use a proper newsletter mailing service like mailchimp or Constant Contact to manage them, and not your Zen Cart admin (because Zen Cart is NOT a newsletter system). With that many customers, sending a newsletter is almost guaranteed to get your server blacklisted by hundreds of email servers all over the world, effectively shutting down all ability to send emails even for normal sales. You don't want that.

As for sending individual emails to a customer, ya, there'll be a problem there. How often do you find yourself doing that via your Admin?