Email Throttling

[jstushnoff]

Does anyone know if zencart's built-in emailer throttles message sending, especially of newsletters, or does it try to send to everyone on the mailing list at once? Can I modify/add email throttling? I'm not afraid of PHP, but only understand it minimally and am learning. . .

[cslhypnotech]

Whenever I've done it, it seems to send one message at a time but I'm not sure if there's any throttling going on at all.

I would like to see a solution for throttling e-mails (ie, X per minute).

[DrByte]

Zen Cart currently does no throttling.

To enable throttling, one would have to build some sort of scheduler and batch-processor, somewhat like simulating a cron job of sorts. Thus, "a few more" emails would get sent from the batch every time someone clicks on a link on your site, until all are sent.

[sparrish]

Is this something that is in the works? If not, I would really like to take a shot at adding it in. I use PHPlist for most newsletters as it handles batch processing, scheduling, and throttling very well. The bridge application from modyourzencart.com appears to be very well constructed, but is lacking a lot of features that would be infinitely useful (and I can't get it to work with the latest versions of ZC and PHPlist). Rather than work on that further, I think it might be best to just work on improvements to the built in newsletter functions for Zen Cart. That way, everything is all in one place in the Zen Cart admin. If this isn't something that is currently being developed, please let me know if anyone would be interested in beta testing or contributing to something like that. I'm definitely in.

[DrByte]

Some preliminary work has been done to throw together a plausible structure to make such a concept work ... with a goal of offering it as an optional plugin for cases where it is desired/needed and the webhost supports it.

It's not on the top of my list at the moment though.

If you want to take a stab at it, go ahead. Please keep in mind the goal of having it touch no core files if possible (as of v1.3.6, functions_email.php will require at least one, maybe two edits to activate the plugin ... this may change in a future release)

[sparrish]

Thanks so much for the reply. I'm going to take a crack at it. I have a concept that should work that won't require modification to any core files. In fact, it should only take three or four files, a database table, and a couple of new config keys. What I have in mind will be focused on using a cron job to send out messages, but the option to manually send out batches will be available too. Of course, I'll go ahead and build scheduling into it as well. I'll keep you updated, and should have some code for testing in a couple of days.

[Website Rob]

Would definitely be a 'touch of class' to have such an option/module for eMail Batching.

If someone has 3,000 or more Customers and tries to send all eMails at one time, it could bring most Servers to their knees and possibly crash quite a few.

[sparrish]

That's the problem that I've run into. Many hosts have emails per hour limits, and aside from that, I've had the newsletter time out on several occasions, and starting over from the beginning to send the list isn't good. I usually end up using PHPlist for the newsletters, but I hate to have to use a separate application when everything is right there in Zen Cart.

I guess now would be a good time to see if anyone would be interested in beta testing? It's going to be GPL with no further restrictions, so no concerns over licensing.

[jstushnoff]

I would be very interested in trying out whatever you come up with sparrish. I'm also sure my clients would make a (small financial) donation if the product turns out to work for them.

[Graffi]

just a nudge that I am also interested in this additional bit of functionality.

As mentioned, my host allows only 200 emails/hour - and I get locked out of Admin if that gets exceeded.

Throttling would be perfect - say, send 150 nwsletters/hour until they're gone -

i certainly would be willing to help test any betas -