Have you been looking for a way to build a newsletter or other email marketing campaign, but you want to stay within the rules so that you don’t get flagged as a spammer? This is very intelligent thinking and you will find that there are a lot of reasons why the PHPlist alternative works for many people who want to communicate with a large base of customers by email. As large as your email base may get, you don’t want to offend folks by overdoing things and that’s why an important PHPlist attribute ends up being the ability to throttle (or limit) your email sending so that you don’t get yourself banned either from your webhost or anyone else on the internet in this day and age when many are so quick to call an email marketer a spammer.
If other emailing scripts have given you grief, why not let PHPlist import your existing customers and handle the work for you? The wide variety of options you have with the PHPlist attributes available to you are going to allow you a much finer level of control than you will find with other scripts and that is safe for you, plus it’s less obnoxious for your web host and customers, too. Always check with your host for their rules on mass emails to make sure you never violate any rules.
Let’s take a look at how you can limit the rate of speed at which your emails are sent out.
First, find this block of code within the config.php file of your PHPlist installation, using a text editor such as Notepad2:
# batch processing
# if you are on a shared host, it will probably be appreciated if you don’t send
# out loads of emails in one go. To do this, you can configure batch processing.
# Please note, the following two values can be overridden by your ISP by using
# a server wide configuration. So if you notice these values to be different
# in reality, that may be the case
# define the amount of emails you want to send per period. If 0, batch processing
# is disabled and messages are sent out as fast as possible
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,0);
# define the length of one batch processing period, in seconds (3600 is an hour)
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,3600);
# to avoid overloading the server that sends your email, you can add a little delay
# between messages that will spread the load of sending
# you will need to find a good value for your own server
# value is in seconds (or you can play with the autothrottle below)
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,0);
Here you can see how easy it is to set up your limitations. All you need to do is consider what a respectful size of your MAILQUEUE BATCH SIZE might be and change that zero to a number such as 100 or even 500. Again, your web hosting provider will have solid advice for you in this regard so always ask them first.
When you define MAILQUEUE BATCH PERIOD, keep in mind that this is in seconds. The default is 3,600 seconds (ie, an hour) so that means one batch will get sent out each hour until all batches have been sent. Your batch size was configured in the section we just covered.
Finally, MAILQUEUE THROTTLE should be set to a number above zero. If you put 20 in this section, it means emails will be sent out at 20 second intervals. Check with your host and remember, the reason why you are trying to remain respectful is that you do not want to bog down the server for other people’s accounts that might be on the same server as you are.
This is all you need to do to get PHPlist to work for you at the rate you desire!
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