[thelist] CDONTS - 3 Questions

[Anthony Baratta]

At 01:20 PM 11/4/2002, Adam Slesinger wrote:
>I've finished it off and it works fine, but I wanted to run 3 questions by
>you all and get your input.
>
>1) The database contains over 12,000 e-mails of people signed up for the
>newsletter.  Should I have any concerns about the webserver running this
>script?  I've tested it with 300 e-mails and it takes about 1 minute before
>it finishes.  The live webserver is supposedly a power house, but should I
>have the IT people make sure that any sort of buffer or memory settings are
>tweaked for sending so many e-mails?  Is there a chance my script may time
>out?

You might want to dump directly to the out going mail queue. See these
evolt articles:

http://www.evolt.org/article/Using_files_to_send_emails_with_IIS_part_1_of_2/17/3419/index.html
http://evolt.org/article/Using_Files_to_Send_Emails_with_IIS_part_2_of_2/17/3875/evolt.org


>2) I learned that BodyFormat and MailFormat make it possible for this to be
>an html formatted e-mail.  I would prefer to be able to send the e-mail as
>plain text as well if the person doesn't support html e-mail.  How do I go
>about sending a 2 part e-mail with ASP/vbScript without implementing
>someone's 3rd party e-mailer tool?  Is it possible without super-complex
>additional scripting?

I recommend that you poll your membership and let them decide on HTML
versus Text by setting a flag in the Database. Then when you run the query,
fork the Message Body and Header info on HTML or Non-HTML to the target user.

>3) My strBody variable comes from an include file that contains just the
>body.  It's an entire html formatted piece and here's just the top of it:
>
>It was a pain in the butt to have to format this html as an ASP variable.
>Is there anyway to leave it alone and have ASP bring it in and automatically
>format each line?  Or do I have to create it like this every time?

You could "suck" in the file using the System File Object. Then use the
Replace Function to personalize it via "tokens". (e.g. !!FirstName!!,
!!LastName!!) What I normally do is create the email as HTML, then run it
through an HTML Strip function to convert to Text. Then with two versions,
I personalize for each user as I sent it out. It's a bit more work upfront,
but saves time later because I only need one "file" ready to send out mail.

Hope this helps.
---
Anthony Baratta
President
Keyboard Jockeys

"Conformity is the refuge of the unimaginative."