Newsletter to +35.000 subscribers: only trouble!!! Need some help...

Hi!



We are having a very hard time to send newsletters to our subscribers using cs-cart.



We have a list of +35.000 and got errors with both PHP and SMTP methods. We are presently at a loss about what to try next. There are several factors that can cause errors, like server configuration. According to our server support, the server itself can handle the operation with no problem whatsoever.



However, there are problems and we feel very discouraged by them. The biggest ones being:


  1. We can’t send Newsletters only to Administrators, so testing our newsletters is out of the question. The funny part is, the feature is there, but it’s not working.


  2. We are not in a situation where we can run tests, it HAS to work!


  3. It nearly chokes our DEDICATED server


  4. It’s not entirely server sided, meaning that it still depends of the browser being open so it can refresh and “send” the script again for every batch. It means the sending will be interrupted if:


  • the browser crashes
  • the browser is accidentally closed
  • the computer goes into standby mode
  • the system crashes and the machine has to be restarted
  • you make an installation that requires immediate restarting
  • there’s a electricity blackout



    These situations are not entirely unlikely, so for us it’s very undesirable. Not to mention that we started sending our newsletter in the morning and had to leave the machine on after working hours to finish the sending. We have, therefore, no idea how long it took to send the newsletter to all email subscribers.


  1. We got errors with both PHP and SMTP methods.


  2. CS-Cart support hasn’t found a solution for it yet and are fully confident the problems were only “temporary server issues. try again”. But they don’t grasp one thing: there’s no trying again, because we don’t want part of our list (those who got the newsletter before the script failed) to think we are spamming them. Part of our list here means not only 50 people, but anything between 1.000 to 35.000 people!



    We are presently at a loss about what to try next.



    I’m posting our problem here hoping that someone else has experienced the same problem with their Newsletter, so we could share knowledge and perhaps find a solution to this.



    Cheers,

    Wallace

Hi, I’m new to Cs-cart and I never used the integrated newsletter function of it. But my current online store has 25.000 newsletter subscriber and I’m experienced on sending newsletter to them.



The point is, I don’t recommend you to use this module to send messages to such numbers of subscriber. In this situation the best that you can do is to pay for a third software/service to send it for you. Trust me, I tryed many ways, this is the best solution.



There is a very interesting article in ecommercespot about sending newsletter and explain the various ways to send it.



[url]ecommercespot.com is for sale | HugeDomains



I hope it helps.

I would not use CS-Cart to handle that many subscribers.



I use Aweber, as seen in sig. Or you can get a hosted solution like Sendstudio which are much more reliable.

To be completely honest I wouldn’t use CS-Cart for the newsletter. I would go with the software that does it the best and is made for high subscriber volume such as Constant Contact.

Hi again,



Thanks for your feedback folks, we really appreciate it. We are now considering which solution to use and its integration with cscart. It would be great if the data from the cscart profile could be fetched to fill in the external newsletter subscribers, so that our users could subscribe without having to post their names and emails more than once… Subscribing from their cscart profile would be the best solution.



Thanks again!

Wallace

[quote name=‘Zyles’]I would not use CS-Cart to handle that many subscribers.



I use Aweber, as seen in sig. Or you can get a hosted solution like Sendstudio which are much more reliable.[/QUOTE]



Hi Zyles, I’m curious about your post, Here in Brazil I utilize a 3d party Braziliam software to send my newsletter, but I’m not satisfied with it…



I’m looking for a new solution… as you suggest, I’m looking Aweber and Sendstudio , but you said something interesting about Sendstudio beeing more reliable, can you explain that?



I have 25.000 subscriber and a very high increase rate, something like 5000 for month… You seems to experienced with this subject, what would you recommend?



Thanks!

[quote name=‘Pozzi’]Hi Zyles, I’m curious about your post, Here in Brazil I utilize a 3d party Braziliam software to send my newsletter, but I’m not satisfied with it…



I’m looking for a new solution… as you suggest, I’m looking Aweber and Sendstudio , but you said something interesting about Sendstudio beeing more reliable, can you explain that?



I have 25.000 subscriber and a very high increase rate, something like 5000 for month… You seems to experienced with this subject, what would you recommend?



Thanks![/QUOTE]



I mean that Aweber and Sendstudio are both more reliable than CS-Cart.



I actually think Aweber is more reliable than Sendstudio because,



If you host your own, you can get blacklisted for SPAM, even if you don’t spam. Aweber gives you high delivery rate and avoids spamboxes mostly, they got deals with ISPss to avoid such problems. Which is really important. This is the main advantage of going with a hosted solution.



Aweber has the best prices IMO and best service I’ve come across. I rather outsource than use my own server because of the importance of delivery and reliability.



Altho your language needs to be in english to use them.

I was comparing Aweber against Constantcontact with Alexa.com traffic comparison, and noticed that Aweber got much more traffic than Constantcontact. Pagerank-wise, they are very similar.



Aweber does have the best prices, no doubt.



But there’s a problem. Sometimes users subscribe to lists using temporary emails or email addresses that they never open. Hotmail, for one, is used a lot by people who just need an email to register themselves somewhere and buy a couple of things. Well, in a list of over 35.000, you can imagine the number of emails that go obsolete every month.



Hosted programs like Aweber and Constantcontact have no problem sending these emails. But when they get a response from places like Hotmail that a certain number of emails are non-existent, then their engine stops the whole operation and locks, because they assume this is a spam campaign.



In that sense, if you are having a huge list, I would rather go for a “hosted-by-me” solution.

[quote name=‘illusion’]

Hosted programs like Aweber and Constantcontact have no problem sending these emails. But when they get a response from places like Hotmail that a certain number of emails are non-existent, then their engine stops the whole operation and locks, because they assume this is a spam campaign.[/QUOTE]



Where have you read this?

We tried Constantcontact, and that’s exactly what happened to us. The sending stopped when the number of emails sent reached approx. 20%. We were having huge problems with Hotmail’s spam filters at the time, and tried Constantcontact to get around the problem.



It didn’t work for us.



I don’t really know about Aweber, but just assume the principles are the same. But I could be wrong.

Aweber does not. They give you a list of leads that could not be delivered to.