newsletter - email limit?

Hello,
Is there a limit on the amount of emails you can send with the newsletter? I have used other services in the past and they limit the amount of emails that go out every couple of minutes. So my questions are:

1. Is there a limit on the amount of newsletter emails we can send out?

2. If we have a huge email list, is it safe to send the newsletter to that entrie list at the same time? Will our server be marked as a spam server or anything if we send out a lot of newsletter emails?

Thanks.

Zen Cart does not impose any limit BUT your host may...

FYI:
Some mail ISP's have been reported recently to be bouncing any mail that is addressed to more than 5 people in an effort to curb SPAM. Not a move that is conducive to eCommerce and legitimate mail...

Most ISP's limit the amount of emails a site can send out unless you have a Specific Hosting arrangement. Its to control Spam etc.
100 per hour is about the norm

You need to look at phplist which your ISP will have if you are using a CPanel system. You will find it in fantastico.

Hope this helps

With most servers, it's not the spam issue they are concerned about, but you overwhelming the server. If you are like a lot us, you are on a shared server at your webhost. This means your $10-20/month website is located on a the same server that hundreds of other websites are located on. If you click 'send' in the newsletter manager your site attempts to send as fast as possible a newsletter to everyone in your database. The server at your web host may let a few hundred emails through, then to protect against a huge spike in usage that affects all the sites on the same machine you are on, shuts down for a instant, or long enough to kill your request, then 'restarts'. All websites on that server then 'blink'.

What you need to do is throttle down the sending of the emails to so many an hour or say 1 email every 8 seconds (480 emails/hour). This requires a special program. I have written a program that does this, and if there was interest in it I will post it as a contribution.

it would be nice to have that programme

lucianman,
You should check your hosts terms of service...

Most allow mail for normal business operations and for a busy shop with maybe 5 persons responding to orders this would be about 2-3 minutes per response X 5 or about 150 per hour.

Mass mailing is a business and one can subscribe to services to conduct these mass mailings BUT at costs that are normally more than one pays for hosting

Lucianman,

I would like to submit the program but your Moderator, Dr Byte, thinks I am abusing the forum. Jeebus!

npn2531:

Lucianman,

I would like to submit the program but your Moderator, Dr Byte, thinks I am abusing the forum. Jeebus!

To clarify, you've posted multiple posts asking for people to ask for you to share your addon.

As I said privately, my point was: Why not just come out and share it and invite feedback, instead of making duplicate advert posts all over the forum, contrary to forum etiquette?

But, now that you've had someone come out and bite at your invitation, I hope you'll carry on and share it so you can get the feedback you desire, and also benefit the community in the process.

There's also this mod:
numinix.com/index.php?main_page=document_general_info&cPath=168_172_164&products_id=777

Is it possible to tell zencart to use a third party like smtp.com?
Even if it means modifying core files?

deko:

Is it possible to tell zencart to use a third party like smtp.com?
Even if it means modifying core files?

Scratch that, I've just seen something in configuration that looks like it might do the job.

Will: There's also this mod:
numinix.com/index.php?main_page=document_general_info&cPath=168_172_164&products_id=777

Limit the number of emails per hour?

I was having a problem with getting timed out from sending large email newsletters (well, 500+).

My solution was to add query_builder records to cut up the email list into smaller pieces.

Examples:

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 0, 200

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 200, 200

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 400, 200

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 600, 200

Hope this helps people.

beretta627:

I was having a problem with getting timed out from sending large email newsletters (well, 500+).

My solution was to add query_builder records to cut up the email list into smaller pieces.

Examples:

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 0, 200

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 200, 200

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 400, 200

select c.customers_firstname, c.customers_lastname, s.email_address as customers_email_address from TABLE_SUBSCRIBERS as s left join TABLE_CUSTOMERS as c on c.customers_id = s.customers_id limit 600, 200

Hope this helps people.

This looks promising. How did you use this? I assume you have to come back every hour and send the newsletter to the next list? What did you modify to get the shortened lists into the audience dropdown?

I would also be interested in finding a solution to this, would be a great add-on for sites where my customer database is starting to grow, but my host limits me to 500 mails/hour.

Originally Posted by beretta627
I was having a problem with getting timed out from sending large email newsletters

Originally Posted by karl19
I would also be interested in finding a solution to this, would be a great add-on for sites where my customer database is starting to grow, but my host limits me to 500 mails/hour.
For all concerned: Most shared hosting impose a per hour email limit.
Your email with them is for the purpose of conducting "business" -
Order confirmations, account creation mail, general customer query... If you use up your per hour allotment attempting to send "advertising emails" - then your general mail will not be processed.

Advertising is another animal all together and there are separate services to support this and should be part of your advertising budget.

Thanks for the input on this, I agree in principle that advertisement mail-outs would be better suited to be run through a bespoke system, whether it be an open source solution like PhpList, or a hosted setup.

Nonetheless, for a situation where running out a few hundred newsletters a couple of times a year, I don't feel this really justifies the additional work required to setup, or learn a separate setup. A ZenCart administrator might have 600 subscribers, be comfortable with the admin and can get their head around putting together a simple newsletter within this system, but would feel uncomfortable about having to learn a different system, never mind having to export customer lists or something like that. Instead, if they could throttle their list of 600 users into batches of 300/hour, I'd think many users would prefer this.

This is just my personal opinion, based on my own feeling and the requirements and desires I've got from our customers - it might be that others have different opinions of course!

karl19:

Instead, if they could throttle their list of 600 users into batches of 300/hour, I'd think many users would prefer this.
As long as they realize that this stops all other email communication for the hours this consumes their per hour allotment

I've just completed a small modification to the newsletter page for a client.

What the mod does is throttle the email sending rate to 80% of your server limit (which you input manually as a new key on the email configuration page). So if you set a value of 1000 for the server limit, it will send emails at the rate of one every 4.5 seconds, giving an overall rate of 800/hr. That leaves a reasonable percentage of the server allowance for normal store emails to proceed unimpeded.

The script progress is shown on the admin page, and it shouldn't tie up a lot of server CPU resources (on linux servers) because the mod uses the php sleep function as the throttle. I don't think it's suitable for Windows servers though - I believe the php sleep function doesn't work the same on those.

If anyone wants to participate in beta-testing this mod, contact me via PM.

That's great bunyip, I've sent you a message, would be interested in checking out your modification.

To follow up on one of the earlier contributions mentioned, I've been in touch with the person who put together a throttle script and asked for feedback (npn2531). I couldn't get it to work in my ZenCart (it was originally for osCommerce), but he very kindly allowed me to post the script here and it would be great if someone could help with bug-fixing it and then the original author would package it up and release it as a contribution.

The error I receive in the admin is:

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /....mypath..../epis_bulkmailer.php on line 61which is this line:

while ($newsletters = mysql_fetch_array($newsletters_query)) {Any input on this would be great!

I'm running v 1.3.8.

Thanks,
Karl

Epis Bulkmailer
Attachment #5582
Link to installation instructions