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Using UE to send to a mailing list.

Thread began 10/29/2009 5:58 am by andy281320 | Last modified 9/13/2010 12:40 pm by Jason Byrnes | 3782 views | 8 replies |

andy281320

Using UE to send to a mailing list.

Hi Guys,

I have a client that wants to send a monthly HTML newsletter to his customer base. I'm considering using the recordset loop feature in UE to do this however am concerned about the size of his mailing list.

There are 10's of thousands of address's and my understanding (which could well be wrong) is my web server should only send around 100 emails an hour. The server is dedicated and has no limits set as to how many emails it can send, though having spoken to the tech support people I rent the server from I'm concerned that sending too many emails in 1 go will cause the server to crash.

Is there any way I can restrict UE to send the emails over a longer time period using a PhP script or something similar?

Regards

Andy

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codamedia

Hey Andy - I don't believe this extension is built for this purpose. Sending mass emails is a lot trickier and there are several other systems available for this purpose. (I won't suggest any here at WA Forums). Simply looping through the database is sure to time out, then you won't have any idea where to pick up the mailing from. With default PHP.INI settings, my experience says you might get 500 emails off if your lucky before this timeout occurs.

I believe the intended purpose of UE is to send a few emails, not mass emails. Now I could be wrong - but I don't think so.

The biggest problem you will face if you try to send Mass Emails like this, is your IP address is sure to get blacklisted at many large ISP's and FreeMail services like "Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc..."... There is a lot to consider before offereing these services to clients.

Just speaking from experience :)

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anonymous

Andy,

For mass email, I would recommend not using Universal Email for a couple of reasons.

One, server companies typically prefer you use the sendmail function from PHP for mass mail rather than using account email protocol which is far more taxing on the server.

Two, Universal Email does not have any way to "throttle" the amount sent.

If you are determined to do this on your own server, Linecraft (help.php) does make a mass email extension that you can define the list based on a recordset and then set the interval for how many emails go out in each burst. I caan confirm that it works decent, but if you want some that works really well and has great tracking, then I would use a service like Mad Mimi (www.madmimi.com/). I swear by them... your emails will look awesome, you will have full reports of how many have read, what links were clicked and by who, and how many bounce. And the pricing is really really good in comparison to other similar providers.

Cheers,

Brian

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andy281320

Originally Said By: SOJO web
  Andy,

For mass email, I would recommend not using Universal Email for a couple of reasons.

One, server companies typically prefer you use the sendmail function from PHP for mass mail rather than using account email protocol which is far more taxing on the server.

Two, Universal Email does not have any way to "throttle" the amount sent.

If you are determined to do this on your own server, Linecraft (help.php) does make a mass email extension that you can define the list based on a recordset and then set the interval for how many emails go out in each burst. I caan confirm that it works decent, but if you want some that works really well and has great tracking, then I would use a service like Mad Mimi (www.madmimi.com/). I swear by them... your emails will look awesome, you will have full reports of how many have read, what links were clicked and by who, and how many bounce. And the pricing is really really good in comparison to other similar providers.

Cheers,

Brian  



Thanks, I'll check out madmini.com now.

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mark52139

Is this still true with the latest 4 version - I would like to create an admin page and send out emails to my customers with what events they are subscribe to. I only have around 200 emails at most at one time. I am a little confused on how to filter the recordset though - tried url parameter and that worked but only sent that to 1 customer need to send to multiple customer at one time and display only their info.

Thanks - Can i do this with Webassist or should i look at emailmerge?

Originally Said By: SOJO web
  Andy,

For mass email, I would recommend not using Universal Email for a couple of reasons.

One, server companies typically prefer you use the sendmail function from PHP for mass mail rather than using account email protocol which is far more taxing on the server.

Two, Universal Email does not have any way to "throttle" the amount sent.

If you are determined to do this on your own server, Linecraft (help.php) does make a mass email extension that you can define the list based on a recordset and then set the interval for how many emails go out in each burst. I caan confirm that it works decent, but if you want some that works really well and has great tracking, then I would use a service like Mad Mimi (www.madmimi.com/). I swear by them... your emails will look awesome, you will have full reports of how many have read, what links were clicked and by who, and how many bounce. And the pricing is really really good in comparison to other similar providers.

Cheers,

Brian  
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Eric Mittman

Some of the limitations for using UE as a mass mailer have been updated in version 4. For example you can now throttle the messages that are sent so that you can have a particular number of messages sent at a regular interval.

This is covered in the getting started guide under the section 'Advanced To Options':

universal-email_gsg.php

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dlovas275157

Eric,

Eventhough throttling is available, won't the script still have to run in the background for a long period of time in order to send off 2,000-20,000 emails, and eventually timeout based on most webhost's php.ini settings.

I may be wrong, but please advise as I am trying to setup something similar (send enewsletter to 7,000 subscribers). Thanks.

Using DWCS5 / UE 4

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Jason ByrnesWebAssist

yes, the php server settings may still prevent the script form functioning long enough for all emails to be sent.


You may be able to get around it by adding the following at line 1:

php:
<?php

set_time_limit
(0);
?>
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andy281320

I appreciate this is not what UE is designed for, I just wondered if anyone had found a way to "throttle" the number of emails sent by editing / adding PhP scripts. I've kinda got so used to using webassist products I always try to use them before looking elsewhere.

I'll take a look around the web for a newsletter manager type program, I doubt I'll have a problem (fingers crossed) with blacklisting as the mail is aimed at my clients actual customer list, I'm assured it's all opt in and above board. As I'm typing this I'm thinking it might be an idea to do more research on this before agreeing to take over the site ;)

Thanks for the warning.

Andy

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