Custom mailing list problems - MySQL/Perl - II

[Himself]

The thread was just closed so I had to open up another one. Just one more quik thing:

First of all, let me say that I think HR offers a great service, and for a great price no less. I switched over to them the same day I aheard about them.

Everyone knows that mass mailings are to be expected as a site promotion tool - especially when you devoted time to building your member database, and HR obviously knows this, as they offer free programs to send mailings out.

It seems that most are still missing the point. Its not that I'm not aware that 15000 emails are alot of emails - especially for shared servers! My point is, that resources should be automatically allocated in terms of priority, so that there'll be no obvious affect (on other accounts) when mail is being sent.
The difference between shared servers and servers dedicated to email blasts isnt that the dedicated servers "allow" you to send alotta emails. Its that they dedictate more resources and therefore a higher priority to emails. SO where as it would take 24-48 hours to blast out to a database of 500000 on an email server, on a regular server, it would take over a week.

My suggestion to HR would be to setup their servers as most other hosting companies do; Set a max on the number of emails that any one user can send PER HOUR, as opposed to completely restricting the number of emails one can send or suspending someone's account because they expected that the servers were already setup as such.

-Himself

[petesmc]

Hi,

Most servers do not do this and plainly ask you to pay more, upgrade your plan, tell you to get a dedicated company to send your emails, or simply ask you to leave. They will hardly ever tell you that in their TOS.

Plus a dedicated email server ONLY send email out and still, send even 10000 emails can really bog down the server.

On a shared server, you must respect what everyone else expects, servers that where they can actually view their page and not have to worry about people overloading the server with emnails. Also, 15000 emails is ALLOT for a shared server, for a dedicated email server, this is nothing if you want to pay for the bandwidth used of those emails.

If HR was to limit the amount of emails (to a resonable limit) sent every hour, you would be waiting decades to send your 15000 emails of because there would probably already be the limit being sent.

This issue is basically a matter of repect: To fellow customers and to the servers in which the customers are on.

If your sending mail out affects other customers then they have a right to be angry at you and we do not want that to have to happen.

I hope you will understand...

-Peter

[spyres]

Good answer Pete!

[tyler]

I have no idea if I am one of those affected by the mass e-mailing, but until a few weeks ago, I have had *so* much trouble with mail, I hesitate every time I post to any of my lists.

These are private club lists with a few hundred subscribers each, and maybe - just maybe - collectively we would send out 15000 messages over the course of a year. I've had days when posting two messages to my lists took 12 hours to arrive, some even longer - and was happening continuously for awhile.

I don't know what plan you purchased, but I can't believe you thought for a minute that spamming the world was part of the package, no matter what type of business you are in. You said in the other thread that you have one web page up and the need to send out 15000 emails daily to support it? What exactly are you marketing?

It was my understanding that HR is in the web hosting business - not the mass email business. The fact that mailing lists are offered, is a service for customers running web sites - not people doing email marketing with a token web page.

It's not a question of getting what you pay for. It's a question of purchasing what you need from the right supplier.

[hutch]

Can anyone tell me what they know about email blasts and at what point (quantity wise) it is considered a "blast"

[cnymike]

I have found that on another host I use that I can safely mail several hundred emails at a shot whithout any problems. Well, there are some problems, but they are delivery problems, not sending problems. Since I use BCC for the address list, some servers see that as spam and reject the email which really sucks because it is not spam at all but legitimate email that my users what to receive. But to respect their privacy, I must use BCC. The only way around this seems to be the use of a paid mail delivery service, which I just can't justify right now.