Cannot send email to customers anymore (admin problem)

Hi,

I have version 1.3.9 of Zen-Cart. Since a while I cannot send customers an newsletter or email anymore in the Admin.
What happens is that:

• with newletters, I can make the newsletter, but when I click at the Send-button nothing happens, the page is loading but after a while it just stopt and you see a blank page.
• with email: I just cannot load the page where I can send an email to customers (the page is also loading and stops also after a while with showing an empty blank page)

I have made a copy of my webstore to try some things. I am busy loading the database from the webstore to see after what tables I cannot send the email or newsletters anymore. The customer-tables went ok, after that I still could send email or newsletter. But after loading the order-tables I could not use the email or newletter option anymore.

Does someone have a clue about what to do to solve this?

Admin->Configuration->Email Options->Audience-Select Count Display -- turn it off as that might be what's timing out.

Hi DrByte,

Thank you for your fast reply, I have turned it off, but I still have the same problem..

How many customers in your store? 500 or 5000000?

Hi DrByte

I have 3163 costumers.. If I transport the orders table from my working webstore to my test web then the problems begin, is there maybe a way to delete old orders from this file? I am afraid that this file became too big...

Hi DrByte,

If I only import the customer tables or only import the order tables from my webstore nothing went wrong, but the combination of importing order tables and customer tables went wrong, I am afraid that alle files are too large.

customers 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	3.151 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	639,4 KB 	-
customers_basket 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	1.037 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	89,7 KB 	-
customers_basket_attributes 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	770 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	98,1 KB 	-
customers_info 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	3.151 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	146,9 KB 	-
customers_wishlist 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	0 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	1,0 KB 	-


orders 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	5.417 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	2,3 MB 	-
orders_products 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	10.870 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	1,4 MB 	-
orders_products_attributes 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	9.208 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	1,4 MB 	-
orders_products_download 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	0 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	1,0 KB 	-
orders_status 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	8 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	3,2 KB 	-
orders_status_history 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	7.189 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	622,1 KB 	-
orders_total 	Verkennen 	Structuur 	Zoeken 	Invoegen 	Legen 	Verwijderen 	16.297 	MyISAM 	latin1_swedish_ci 	1,6 MB

I don't understand. Why are you importing customers and orders?

I made a copy of my webstore to see where the problem lies. After copying the databasefiles customers and orders then I could not use the email or newspaperfunction of the admin anymore.. These files are too large, I have deleted now a few years of orders, and now I can use these functions anymore, but it still takes a couple of minutes before it loads.. The orders table and the orders_total table are now a lot of smaller, but I do not know how to make all the other order-tables smaller, expecially the order_products table is extemely large..

You don't need to prune your "orders" or orders_total, or any other order-related tables because of email problems.

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?

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?

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

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