New user issues

Hi,

I am making some headway emailing my club’s 600 members, but I have the following issues.

I am getting Internal Server Error with no errors in the server logs. After repeated attempts I was able to clock the time to precisely two minutes before the Internal Server Error pops up, which leads me to wonder if my hosting provider has some kind of time limit. In that two minutes a little over 200 emails are sent according to the WA UE email log entries.

How can I break up the sending into thirds or groups of 200? I would then create 3 forms and “Send” buttons on my email page. But I don’t know how to handle splitting up the database, or creating the recordset to just select 200 entries at a time. Then the next 200 when I click the 2nd “Send” button. Or is there a better way to do this?

How can I skip over blank email address fields, I see them in the WA UE logs?

In the past, when I have manually sent out email to this membership, I would receive numerous (20-30) delivery failure notices. When I use WA UE with the same list (database) of email addresses, I don’t receive any delivery failure notices. Why might that be? I know there are some bad email addresses in the list.

Thanks,
Dennis

Bad email bounce messages should be sent to the "return path" email address specified in the From settings in Universal email.

You would filter out blank email addresses with a WHERE clause in your recordset to remove them like: WHERE emailColumn <> ''

One way to break up the email into groups of 200 is to add a limit clause to the recordset like: LIMIT 200

That will only return 200 rows. Then you could filter out already sent emails by using the email log to remove email addresses that have already been sent to using something like: WHERE emailColumn NOT IN (Select emailTo FROM logtable WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 1 DAY) <= emailDate )

That would remove all email addresses that have been sent in the past day... so putting it all together you might have:

WHERE emailColumn <> '' AND emailColumn NOT IN (Select emailTo FROM logtable WHERE DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 1 DAY) <= emailDate ) LIMIT 200

Then you could keep sending the email until the recordset was empty, which you could identify by adding a "done" message with the server behavior "show if recordset is empty" applied to it.

Ray,

Thank you so much for you suggestions with precise instructions (I need those). The "... so putting it all together you might have:..." was terrific.

The repeated sending to the limited groups of 200 appears to be working great.

I am still concerned about the lack of bounced mail messages. I have the same (valid) email address in the From:, Reply To:, and Return path: fields. I have received some reply's, but not a single bounce message. I know there are some invalid email address in the database.

I also see some blank email addresses in the email log however a small fraction compared to the number of blanks in the database. Any ideas why those exist? I'm confident your suggestion for filtering the blanks is working (for the most part) because many blank rows are ignored. Our MySQL database was created by using SQLyog to import an Excel spreadsheet.

Dennis

the blanks you are seing in the database could because those ones are NULL

change the where clause:
WHERE emailColumn <> ''

to check for NULL as well:
WHERE emailColumn <> '' AND emailColumn <> NULL


are the invalid email addresses in your database in a valid email format?

if the address is not a valid email address format, it will not be sent to the smtp server in order for a bounce back message to occur.


in other words if the address in the database does not contain a name followed by the @ symbol and a domain Universal Email will ignore that address.

Hi Jason,

I will try your suggestion of checking for NULL. However when I open the email log with SQLyog I do not see (NULL) in the email address field, I even clicked on the field wondering if I might see that a space was entered by accident.

Yes the invalid email addresses are in a valid format. I know there are some that should be bouncing because I had manually (import addresses into MS Outlook) sent to the same address list prior to using WA UE. I received 50 or so failure notices to the same return address as the one I'm using with UE.

Thanks,
Dennis

I have created a support ticket so we can look into this issue further.

To view and edit your support ticket, please log into your support history:
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If anyone else is experiencing this same issue, please append to this thread.