Using Universal Email 4 to send Newsletters for client? Is this really feasible?

I am just wondering if anyone here is using Universal Email to send out a newsletter (dynamically) to a decent sized (and growing) email list?

I have setup and tested a DataAssist form that sends a template that I have created and the client would use a template to send out the email using a WA HTML Editor filed to enter their contents.

This all seems to work just fine with one email address, I am just wondering if it will actually work for an email list of over 850 addresses.

So I guess the question is how large of a mailing list are you using WA UE for and how much success have you had?

Also, has anyone come up with any tricky tracking code to use with UE if they are using it for this purpose.

Thanks.

I know of at least one person sending a mailing list of over 10,000:
showpost.php?p=80610&postcount=2

I have heard from a couple other people in the past sending to rather large groups as well.

Yes, I read that post earlier, which prompted me to ask this question. :)

I was wondering how many users have had success with this Extension in this kind of situation, and if so what extra settings they used, either on the server or in UE.

Thanks.

any extra settings will depend on the smtp servers configuration. it will be different from user to user.

the hurdle for sending mass mailings is to stay within the SMTP serves limits for concurrent connections.


most SMTP servers will have limits set for the number of emails you can send in a given time period.

In the to settings, you can set a time delay for sending each message, and set the maximum number that can be sent in any given time period to stay within the smtp servers limits.

Yes, I noticed the delay settings. My upstream provider has a standard 200 email per hour limit on their SMTP server (this is very low!) which can be upped to 600 / hr with a bit more $.

I did a quick script to test this limit through php's mail() function and sent over 600 emails in 5 minutes without issue. Now wheter or not I will hear about this or not is another question. I did not notice any server load increase in WHM while running my little script.

So this suggests that the mail() function bypasses the SMTP limit that they have set. Does this make sense?

Does UE use mail() in the same manner?

Does the UE log track when the emailings fail, at what point and why?

UE uses mail(), so it would have the same limitations (or lack of).

Yes the log will allow you to store whatever information about outgoing emails you want, including any relevant error messages.

OK we've heard from the company, thanks Jason and Ray! :)

Any users willing to share their experiences?

Not sure what to tell you, I have created a newsletter 'create and send' functionality in a couple of clients' site Admins (see images 1-4).

My hosts say:

  Every customer is rate limited to a 1000 messages per hour (any bcc or cc address will count as one). This is to avoid mail delays and individual customers overloading the system.

The figure is calculated every 15 minutes based on the last hour so if you sent 1000 messages 45 minutes ago then just after another 15 minutes that figure should be cleared and you can send another 1000.

We suggest customers use some kind of mailing software that has rate limiting options but failing that then split yours lists up and you should be ok.  

Everything seems to work as it should. Am using DataAssist (with HTML Editor) and UE4.

Thanks neilo,

It is nice to hear from other users of WebAssist that have had successes with their products.

That is a very interesting implementation as well. Thank you for the screenshots. :)