Anything involving emails incredibly slow.

Hi all,

Running 1.3.8a

Having a long running battle with emails. Anything to do with sending emails from the admin takes ages to load.
Send email to customers and send coupon to customers generally takes up to one minute to load the initial page. After that when it comes to actually sending the mail as in the final submit button press it takes up to another minute for the page to refresh and say email successfully sent. Newsletter mailings are not completing and are generally crashing about 600-800 customers in.

I thought it may have been an issue with the server but we have just moved servers (from a windows VPS to a Linux VPS) and the problem persists / is identical. Incredibly slow loads and crashes for mass mailings. There are no outgoing email throttles that would stop the newsletter and the problem is present even sending one email.

Ay thoughts or advice gratefully received.

Sucks that nobody resonded to you... I found this via Google after having the same symptoms.

In my case, everything worked fine up until Friday then suddenly just what you describe - anything involving an email is dreadfully slow. I tried changing from php to sendmail to smtp, etc... smtp might be a little faster but not much. It can take upwards of 2 minutes to load a page involving an email.

My host says they're sure its not them.

By any chance (hoping you're still subscribed here) did you find a solution?

There seem to be some confusing suppositions here.

Is this "slow" factor simply in DRAWING the page BEFORE even attempting to send an email?
If so, then it has NOTHING to do with any actual email sending; instead it's because your customer list is very long and it's taking a long time to draw and download the content of the pulldown where you can select which customer to send to. A rewrite of how that works is probably in order, since doing anything different there would require rearchitecting to use some sort of ajax loader instead of pure plain html. This would affect only the 2 pages in the Admin where customer email addresses are presented for sending messages to. It would not have any effect on any other pages.

If the "slow" is actually SENDING an email AFTER pressing Submit, then it would affect EVERY email sent by the store. If that's where your problem lies, then the problem is that your host's email server is slow in responding when your store is attempting to send the email which you've ALREADY composed and clicking Submit to send it.

Its the latter. Nothing to do with customer list size because I tried it again with a fresh copy of Zen and it still takes forever. They're insisting everything is golden. Darn... I liked this host too. But yeah, I see it has to be at the server now. I didn't notice at first but its also just my normal outgoing mail (in Thunderbird, for example) that's also taking up to 2 mins to get sent.

I hate it when tech support folks just assign blame without even looking at things.

Athough I wonder if your knowledge can help with this: Why do you suppose some forms (such as the password recovery) take several minutes, but the actual "contact us" form is darn-near instant?

No idea, since as far as Zen Cart is concerned, it always sends emails immediately. There's no built-in queuing of emails in Zen Cart v1.5.1 or older.

I think I can answer my own question there...

all the other functions are sending an email from the server out to the world. The contact us form sends an email from the server to the server (as long as the admin email addy is hosted at the same server)

Ya, that could explain part of the disparity.