Sending newsletter to 10.000+ customers

[Kcm75]

My plan is to send a newsletter with the Zencart newsletters manager for the first time. The amount of receiving customers would be about 10.000.

I will use the smtp of our office 365 account and will try to send it at night.

Can some one tell me an estimated time it will take to send 10k emails and what would be the effect on the server load?
Can I see the progress with the zencart newsletter manager?

[DrByte]

It's not a matter of server load. The load will be minimal. The problem is that it will timeout with that many to process. And your Office 365 account may reject them, which will make it hard to know where to re-start sending from. You might even get your account locked if you haven't pre-confirmed that they're okay with you sending that many messages at once.

Given that most stores don't utilize services like Office365, and can't risk sending mass messages due to risk of getting IP blocked for spam, most opt to use a service like MailChimp whose business is specifically focused on reliable delivery of emails.
As such, the newsletter "function" in Zen Cart hasn't been adapted to do all those things that other companies build an entire business around.
Instead, the recommendation has long been to grab the Email Address Exporter plugin and use it to extract that list of email addresses and import it into Mailchimp.

There's a HUGE benefit to doing that, in that you will then also have the ability to track "open rates" and "click rates" to understand audience engagement with your newsletter content. It also allows customers to one-click unsubscribe in a way that's compliant with email regulations.

There's also a mailchimp plugin that allows customers to signup to your newsletter from a sidebox on your store.

There are numerous other services besides Mailchimp; I'm only mentioning it because it's free up to a certain number of subscribers, and there's a plugin to implement some of its features.

[Kcm75]

Many thanks for the advise, it is very helpfull.

I found https://www.phplist.org/ and this might be a good solution for me.

[swguy]

With 10K emails, you really ought to use an email service provider like Mailchimp. And you also need to use a mechanism like double-opt-in to ensure these people actually *want* to receive mail from you, because it sounds like you're using your entire customer database.

[Website Rob]

Many thanks for the advise, it is very helpfull.

I found https://www.phplist.org/ and this might be a good solution for me.

If using a self-hosted eMail Mgr. then you should check with your Hoster as to how many can be sent per hour or minute, also known as batching. I know from experience that sending 10,000 all at once, will definitely put a large load on a server and can negatively impact server performance. The server Mail queue can also get clogged up with eMails that could not be sent and will need to be resent or, after a few days of trying to resend, cannot be sent at all and are kicked back to you.

A 3rd party Mail service can avoid all these problems and if the cost can be justified, is definitely a better option for all kinds of reasons.