[thelist] SENDING NEWSLETTERS

[Ken Schaefer]

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From: "Martyn Haigh" <martyn.haigh at virgincosmetics.com>
Subject: RE: [thelist] SENDING NEWSLETTERS


: I've been having problems with sending out newsletters too.
:
: I have a database of around 8000 people whom I'm obliged to send a
: newsletter to every now and again.  I found that using a normal ASP Email
: solution (CDONTS) just didn't work.  I have never used JMail or ASPEMail,
: but I would imagine that they would present the same problems :
:
: When you have a lot of users the ASP script you use tends to stop working,
: in my case it would send email to every 50th person - obviously no good!
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If you are using CDONTS, or any other sort of component that just dumps
little text files into the pickup directory of your SMTP server, then the
problem is usually caused by the fact that the server can't allocate hard
disk space quickly enough.

If you really want to "roll your own" you need to use a more robust system
that can queue the creation of the actual message files. I believe ASPMail
(or was it ASPEmail) has such a polling system. Alternatively, if you're
using SQL Server and Exchange, then create a job in SQL Server to have
Exchange send the mail for you.

-or-

Don't use an ASP page at all - use a .vbs file that you can call
asynchronously from your ASP page (via WSH.Shell), that uses the .Sleep
method (say for 100 or 200 milliseconds) between sending each message. This
works for the 20,000 odd messages we send out.

If you have really large data sets, then use dedicated list server software.

Cheers
Ken