Upgrading, lost a bunch of stuff

[webmaster1]

You might want to clarify in your upgrade text what "overwrite your old files with the new ones" actually means.  I overwrote every file even the ones that control e-mail subscribes and bounced message handling and that took me forever to get working properly because they where old files.

I also can't even log into list mail anymore.  Get this error:

Unknown column 'chtmlid' in 'field list'

Guess I'm back to square one here with this script.

Chris Elliott

[shepherd]

You're right, it's not just a straight replace! The instructions should say that the new config.php.txt file needs configuration with the same details as your old config.php file, then lop off the .txt ending and upload. Everything else just carries over.

You should be able to find your old config.php because it won't have been over-written by config.php.txt.

I also CHMOD'd bounce.cgi 755.

All works fine. You need to define the !confirm and !remove messages again though.

I hope this will now be much quicker than the old 1.77 version, which takes me a day to send to 24,000 people! Won't know until my next newsletter mailing. I bought another mailing program and tried it - quicker but in every other respect crap - the configuration and flexibility in ListMail is excellent. If the speed comes up then we're there!!

[DW]

Chris,

There may have been a problem with applying the database changes during your attempted upgrade.  This can happen if you do not have the correct user permissions, expected table format, or if the process was interrupted.  Did you see "Upgrade detected", then "Done!" on the login page when you first browsed to it?

If you like, submit a Tech Support request of the type "Other" and I'll upgrade your installation and perform any necessary repairs.

You're right, I should have clarified the files to overwrite in the upgrade process.  You do not need to set up config.php again.  It will not be overwritten (because it's named config.php.txt in the ZIP).  You also do not need to replace the CGI files.  If you do replace them they will need to be reconfigured.

shepherd (if that is your real name  I suspect that your mailings will be faster thanks to the "Primary Key" added to the queue table.  Some notes about this improvement were made in the optimizations forum, but it was only included in more recent fresh v1.77b installations and v1.8.  You can likely get even more speed if your mail server is optimized properly for large amounts of email.  A mailing to 24,000 users shouldn't take more than 30-45 mins.  Some servers can send over 720,000 emails per day.

Regards!

[shepherd]

Thanks for mentioning about the cgi's, as I had copied them over and that needed to be corrected (I just copied the old ones back). I didn't know the cgi's were the same in an upgraded program.

Pleased to hear it's likely to be faster nowjavascript:emoticon(':D').

To take it further in the speed department, can you give me any tips for optimizing the mail server for large mailings? Needs to be quite simple as I'm no Unix administrator (it's Webmin on Linux Apache). I would be thrilled if I could send our newsletter in 45 mins.

(By the way, it's Peter Shepherd of trans4mind.com here.)

[DW]

Peter,

I opened a connection to your server (trans4mind.com)'s port 25 and see the server uses Sendmail.  Regretfully, I do not know how to best optimize Sendmail for speed as I have not had to do this for anyone yet.  It's possible the server is already optimized.   I suspect your mailings will be faster with the new v1.8 changes.  Have you noticed any difference?

Chris,

I don't see your tech support request.  Did you manage to get it worked out?

Regards

[toma]

Shepard, I have a similar setup, webmin and mandrake linux using sendmail. My list of 21,000 takes about 6 hours to send using phpmail. I'm not able to send using sendmail at all without getting an error every 15 minutes or so. What method are you using to send your mails that takes 24 hours?

Sinve listmail isn't working right with sendmail I'm looking at installing exim or some other software. I'll keep you posted if I find a way around sendmail.
Tom

PS, I'm using the newest 1.7 and will upgrade to 1.8 this evening for a new mailing.

[shepherd]

Dean, I understand regarding Sendmail optimization. I won't know if it's faster until my next mailing on Tuesday, but I'll post here how it turns out. Fingers crossed.

Tom, I use SMTP Server, not the Sendmail PHP setting. At least, that is what's selected in the Config so I assume that's what's being used. Host is localhost, Port is 25, reconnect every 500 emails, login ID not needed and POP checking not needed. Dean installed the system for me and it's always worked reliably, albeit slowly, and maintains the connection.

If SMTP mail is still slow I'll try internal Sendmail PHP mail setting instead, as 6 hours is not so bad as 24. But Dean says it should be taking 1 hour, so hopefully things can be improved drastically before long, somehow or other. Thanks for letting me know if you find a solution.

[shepherd]

Well, my 24,000 mailing today with version 1.8 took 10 hours, instead of 24 as before. So much better but no miracle. I think I'll try the PHP sending method next time, perhaps that will be down to 6 hours like Tom reported.

That 1 hour figure Dean mentioned still has me salivating though. Reason is, then all mailings could go out and be received Tuesday pm, the best time apparently for sales response.

Cheers, Peter

[DW]

If you have very large HTML+text+attachment emails you might want to consider reducing the size of your message.  Set up attachments as links, and instead of a text copy use a message code of the type "Link to HTML".

If your messages are half the size the mailing should complete in half the time.

Regards

[shepherd]

Thanks for the tip, Dean. I don't have attachments/graphics but the text+html versions combined are a large file, and I could halve that as you say, by making the text part just a message link to the online 'showpage' online version that ListMail provides.

Cheers, Peter