Help please - hostgator

[listmail]

We host with Hostgator.com and have a small list of about 300 people.
What do I have to "tweak" in ListMailPRO in order not to violate their policy please?

We only send out once a week to our list.
(changing from them is just NOT an option at the moment)

Policy is as follows below

Anytime you're sending a message no matter how large your e-mail list is you must throttle it.  We recommend you throttle it to at the very least sending 1 email every 6 seconds. If the mailing list software you're using does not allow you to throttle you must switch to something else. We recommend phplist which can be found in your control panel under fantastico. If you do not throttle and you try sending let's say 500 emails the server will try sending all 500 in 1 second which is not possible. This will cause the server load to go very high and for the entire server to be sluggish until this process is completed. It is our job to keep the server up and running without being sluggish. Anyone who causes the servers load to go high will be suspended and the process will be terminated. If you choose not to throttle you will most likely be suspended for crashing the server.

Many thanks

John :?:

ps FAB program and wonderful support  

[DW]

Hi John,

Thanks for your kind comments.

At this time it is not possible to throttle SMTP email, however it is possible with the alternate method of mailing, Internal PHP mail.  Enable this method on the ListMail Configuration page and specify the required delays where indicated.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance!

Regards

[prepress forums]

Hello,

I have many forums on HostGator and have set up my ListMail to send out email.  I have read that HostGator prefers phpmail and i saw in the control panel where to install that automatically with fantastico.  I tried it but compared to listMail it just was more difficult to use it.

So, for my Prepress Forums and Corvette Forums email I have used my license of ListMail Pro, have had for years and nothing I have seen is as good as ListMail.  I am not realloy clear on best settings.  After 2 tries I have sent out two emails to members and both were problematic.  I'll detail what I tried with my Prepress Forums mail and see what you would recommend.  First I sent mail with SMTP, it went out great.  But later i read a post about a guy got kicked off HostGator for sending mail too quick.

First I ran across a post saying send 50 messages, and delay for 2 minutes between batches, use 500 (ms) per email..  So, I unchecked every other box under "Mail Sending Method" and set it to CHECKED, Internal PHP mail() (delayed to prevent timeouts) [500] (ms) per email and [2] (mins) every [50] emails.

Result was that it stopped every 5 messages, and it never resumed without me manually clicking it.  So, I had to click 28 times to send that message to 1400 people.  I was expecting it to delay itself and every 2 minutes pulse out another 50??  Why did that not work?

SO, then I figured I would just set it to run more messages between delays.  I set it to delay 2 minutes every 500 messages.  After 200 it started rolling error messages saying:

Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Could not execute mail delivery program '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i' in /home/graphic/public_html/DaSender/admin.php on line 1719

Every time I go "Resume" , it just displays the same rolling errors.  So, again I have an email with incomplete execution and am wondering how to configure this correctly on HostGator?

PLEASE HELP

[DW]

Hi JP,

I unfortunately do not bring good news.  HostGator is not recommended for ListMail due to their restrictive policy:

http://listmailpro.com/forum/index.php?topic=1699.0

Perhaps further delays would result in fewer errors... You will have to speak with them about the best settings to use.

Regards

[prepress forums]

Hi DW, Excellent software.. I have used the 20000 ms setting that you recommended and a 2 minute wait every 200 emails.

That got me along but I found the scripts were stopping and had to be restarted allot.  If you put the domail to auto refresh every three minutes or so, it will chug along fine.  Ran steady in peak traffic hours.  I completed a 1400 mailing.

In addition, I will be doing this on weekends, late night from now on.  If that doesn't cut it, I may seek another service to host a generic domain for my email list.  I read your post saying you would be willing to provide service to a subdomain for mail only?  I am interested in that since I am not wanting to move from HostGator but yet will most likely require more robust mailing capability to do all that I want to do with LM Pro.

[DW]

Stalling could be caused by the use of internal PHP mail(), which spawns a new process for each individual mail.  With long DNS lookups the # of processes can grow and, possibly, end up getting themselves 'killed'.

You may want to try throttling SMTP with some custom code instead:
http://listmailpro.com/forum/index.php?topic=1828.0

Regards