Thread

I’m new to using EE and I’m trying to help out a friend of mine with sending out an email to a quite large mailing list.

I’ve tried to do as much research as I can to fix the problem and narrowed it down to switching the Email Protocol to PHP and sending the emails in batches of 50. It seemed to be working fine, however only 309 emails were batched out before getting an error reading:

An Error Was Encountered

Unable to send email at this time.

Unable to send email using PHP mail(). Your server might not be configured to send mail using this method.

Which doesn’t make sense because the server was doing just fine 300 emails ago! I also changed the number down to 25 and even 10 emails a batch and kept getting that error message right away when I tried to ‘finish sending’.

Will anyone be able to help me on this? Do I need to break up his mailing list into emails of 300 and just select and send them out one at a time that way? Or is there a way to fix this and keep it batched and sent out all at once?

Thanks in advance,
Jaxis

PS. I’d like to think of myself as computer savvy, but reading over some of the technical talk and guides go right over my head. If you could please try to keep things either simple speech or a step-by-step explanation on what to do, that’d be wonderful. Thank you!

Some hosts limit the amount you can send per day. I would check with your host on this one and see if they can increase the limit for you. If you are sending a lot you may want to look at a hosted SMTP option like http://sendgrid.com/ since most shared hosts frown on sending out bulk email.

I would strongly suggest that neither EE nor other php programs be used for mailing lists, especially larger ones.

You can use some free services - mailchip allows you to send to a list of 2,000 (I think) for no charge.

If you are serious about your list and your emails - don’t use any CMS for such communication!

@caddisint - I’ll look into sendgrid and send that information along to my friend to see if he’s want to try that instead.

@handyman - At the moment my friend does use mailchip, but we unfortunately have more emails than the free limit allows us, so he saves the emails and puts them on here to then mail out so he doesn’t have to exceed that 2k freedom. I feel like with how frustrating this is starting to become for me (and how much it has been for him!) That everything should just be manually done though gmail or something.. Also what is CMS?

Thanks for the tips!

CMS stands for content management system. Sometimes it pays to pay. Good luck.

By CMS - I mean a content management system - like EE, Drupal, etc.

The mailing functions in these programs is not much different than you writing a simple PHP script…or downloading a free one!

If you truly have a list which you need to constantly mail to, you can’t beat the services - free or paid. I

I have run lists since 1995 - used programs on my computers, servers, etc…...the real mailing list programs are quite advanced.

You can’t do it manually or though gmail…or at least not safely! In the end, you are likely to get blacklisted.

Basically, your best bet is to use a service…..the second option, if you only have to send (not receive, etc.) is a send-only program…like this:
http://www.maxprog.com/site/software/internet-marketing/mass-bulk-emailer_sheet_us.php

BUT, such a program requires that you have a valid sender to bounce the mail off. My ISP opens his server to allow me to relay off of it when I need to send via maxbulk. This requires him to put my IP (what the cable company has given me at that point) into his server.

As I said, all in all you are better spending the bucks if you have that many emails.