Sending email in bulk

Hi,

I just sent an email to about 800 customers. It took a while to finish. Instead of telling me the email has been sent successfully, it gave me a total blank page and the url is:
http://www.dealbyethan.com/admin/mail.php?action=send_email_to_user.
The status bar said "Done". Does that mean the email has sent through? How do I check to confirm?

I would also like to know if it is risky to send email to so many customers at a time. Is it possible to break them down and send in batches? Any suggestion on sending email in bulk? Please advise. Thanks in advance.

It probably means that as far as Zencart is concerned, the mails went through. I'm not sure if there's any checking process, though.

I'm surprised your hosting company would allow that many emails to be sent at once. Most put limits on number of emails per period of time.

You might want to use other software to send that many emails rather than sending them through Zencart. Mailman and Dadamail are two I know about.

I agree the capability to break down Email sending in ZC would be a big plus. Since ZC is already tracking which customers want to get the newsletter, which ones want to be notified of product changes, etc., I would think it would be pretty simple to add a field "how many Emails will your provider allow you to send at a time" and then track which customers the newsletter had been sent to and remind you an hour (or whatever) later that it was time to send the next batch.

Thanks for your response. I don't think all the emails went through. My friend didn't get the email but I myself did. This means I really have no idea who received my email who did not. I thought zencart admin could handle it since it has the option of sending email to all customers. So zencart can't handle sending that many email at once? Is it possible to split them into batches?

I was using phplist for a while but I thought it was rather troublesome to export the email addresses in zencart and import them to phplist. I also thought it doesn't make sense to make customer subscribe during registration on my website but then ask them to unsubscribe on my phplist page. That's why I thought doing everything on zencart will be a better option.

Is Dadamail better or Mailman?

Another option is using MailChimp; I have a sidebox in the downloads area to facilitate this. Exercise great caution when sending large numbers of emails from your own account; you can lose your account in a hurry.

So, there is no way to find out which customers the email was sent to?

And it's commonly known that we can't send email in bulk from zencart admin? Is everyone also exporting and then importing their customers into a mailing list manager to send email in bulk?

Most hosts will limit your sending capacities for email and they don't tell you unless you ask so you think everything worked fine and find out later only a couple of hundred went out :(

I use PHP list and Dr Bytes email exporter from Zen Cart and import into PHP list, it will not duplicate addresses when importing so you'll have unique addresses only.

On the PHP forum there are instructions on how to throttle your list and send a total list but in batches of XXX per hour and that will make your host happy and accomplish a full mailing from one batch.

I have a client who is running into this also. Can you point me to the PHP forum you referred for info on throttling?

Hi,

The documentation for PHPList is here:
http://docs.phplist.com/Documentation

Scroll down to the Controlling Speed area and you'll find info on throttling, you'll need to go in to the PHPList config file and make the changes.

Thanks Ted! I'll give it a look-see.

Just an input from a web host perspective.

Yes, most web hosts limit the access to their resources for sending emails.

As a web host we allow 200 emails per hour and per domain. If you send more emails they will bounce back. Now each host have different limits so make sure you ask your host, it will save you some time.

Now your host my also have a limit on the total of emails you can send in one mailing list, some limit it to 5000, 6000 or so. This means that even if you throttle your email list, when you reach the max, it's over.

In this thread I saw this comment :

Most hosts will limit your sending capacities for email and they don't tell you unless you ask so you think everything worked fine and find out later only a couple of hundred went out

I feel a little bit of sadness and disappointment in this comment but it's not a secret so just ask your host.

Why web hosts are doing that ? first to avoid having spammers on their servers and then to protect their customers against server abuse.

As a web store owner, you goal is probably to get orders and make money. Imagine if your zencart store is on a server where 10 people or more try to send a newsletter to their thousands of customers at the same time. Of course while they are doing that, one of your customer is clicking on the place order button to process his credit card.

What happens then is that the credit card transaction is probably not gonna go through and time out because the server resources are abused by mailing list senders (or other abusers).

Web hosts can't make everybody happy, their often prefer to make sure that the server resources cannot be abused to make sure that most of their customers are gonna be happy. Even if it makes a few unhappy.

Be careful also, most hosts will suspend an account that abuses the server too often.