Cannot send email to customers anymore (admin problem)

[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?

[Princess]

Thank you for the information, I was busy with trying out Mailchimp. I am at the moment busy installing the mailchimp mod. Will this work or will this also overload the server? In that case do I have to add all the newsletter subscribers to mailchimp manually or are there other options to import the newsletter subscribers to mailchimp?

[DrByte]

The Email Address Exporter plugin will let you export lists from your store, which you can import into Mailchimp or other services

[Princess]

Thank you for the tip I will use that next time. I already exported the customers_newsletter table to mailchimp, that also worked fine..