Incomplete Mailings

Support, Tips and Tricks for Proof Group's fmSpark "merge anything" utility for FileMaker Pro.
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2008 5:04 pm
PostPosted: Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:24 am
I have a list of about 1000 contacts and have been using FM Spark to send mailings to them for a month or more. It seems to have stopped working however. After merging, I click in to live mode and click Send All, and it only sends about 75-100 of the messages before stopping. No error message or anything -- it just halts in the middle. Our company's email is now managed by Google and I haven't received any warning from them that we've exceeded any kind of quota. Any ideas?
SeedCode Staff
SeedCode Staff
Posts: 2764
Joined: Thu Nov 20, 2003 11:01 am
PostPosted: Wed Jan 28, 2009 11:44 am
Hi Larry,

It definitely sounds like your exceeding the messages per hour limit of your mail server. The solution for this is to break your list up into smaller groups and sent the mailing as 10 or 12 messages instead of 1. Kind of a pain, especially as you may need to send them an hour apart. I don't know if Google publishes their limits; I'm on the road now bug will check when I get back and let you know.

Best,

John
John Sindelar
SeedCode
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2008 5:04 pm
PostPosted: Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:25 pm
Hi John,

I had a look at Google's help system and they do indeed limit outgoing mail to 500 recipients. So if a user needs to send something to the full list do they essentially need to do a find for the first half, create the mailing from a template, customize it as necessary, then redo everything exactly the same for the second half? Or is there a way to send the full list to FM Spark, and break it up into smaller batches from there? I don't see any obvious way of doing this, but hopefully I'm just missing something. Thanks again.

Larry
SeedCode Staff
SeedCode Staff
Posts: 2764
Joined: Thu Nov 20, 2003 11:01 am
PostPosted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 7:57 am
larrynichols wrote:I had a look at Google's help system and they do indeed limit outgoing mail to 500 recipients. So if a user needs to send something to the full list do they essentially need to do a find for the first half, create the mailing from a template, customize it as necessary, then redo everything exactly the same for the second half?


That's right. Of course you can save the template you modify for the first half so that sending the second is pretty quick, but you get the idea.

larrynichols wrote:Or is there a way to send the full list to FM Spark, and break it up into smaller batches from there? I don't see any obvious way of doing this, but hopefully I'm just missing something.


There is no way to do this as one mailing in fmSpark; we currently have no provisions for segmenting a single mailing into multiple groups.

By the way, I don't know if I read Google's stance on this the same way. I think they may use different limits at different times so you may want to try batches smaller than 500 users. Let us know how it goes.
John Sindelar
SeedCode
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2008 5:04 pm
PostPosted: Thu May 14, 2009 4:05 pm
Hi John,

I've been wrestling with sending limits for awhile now. We use Google mail but any mail hosting service we've contacted seems to have sending limits of 1000 or less. Since our list has grown to over 1000, this has posed problems. Getting staff to send the email 3 or 4 times isn't really an option.

Looking back at Google's documentation, they recommend sending portions of the list from different email addresses. So we could have a half dozen email addresses like [email protected], [email protected], etc. This would work fine for us. I can have most of the addresses forward any responses to one main newsletter address. And this way, the staff doesn't have to worry about waiting an hour or more before sending the next batch.

The mail server settings for a batch seem to be set in the "connect to server" script, in a variable called $connectionSettings. The variable looks like this:

$connectionType="SMTP";$server="mail.something.net";$userName="";$password="";$authType="Login";$useSSL="sslOff";$timeout="60";$port="25"

This data gets pulled from the current user account, but for now I'd probably just hard code a few different variations of this as variables, each giving a different $userName and $password. The question is how to make the switch midway through sending a batch.

In the script "send all messages ( no dialog )", the "connect to server" and "disconnect from server" scripts are called before and after the loop, which makes sense. Before reworking the loop to disconnect and reconnect with new account info every few hundred messages, I wanted to run this by you and see if there are any pitfalls I should be aware of. Or maybe you know of this being done by someone else and have a recommendation? Any input would be appreciated. Thanks John.

Larry
SeedCode Staff
SeedCode Staff
Posts: 2764
Joined: Thu Nov 20, 2003 11:01 am
PostPosted: Fri May 15, 2009 6:43 am
Hi Larry,

I like the way you're thinking about this. But rather than interrupt that loop to change FROM addresses, we may have a better solution for you.

The next version of fmSpark will support throttling (sending a maximum of X emails every Y minutes) using server side scripting. And it is nearly ready for release.

So I'll be sending you an email with information about how we might be able to get you a pre-release copy. =)

I hope that helps,

John
John Sindelar
SeedCode

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