Hi Peta,
Glad to hear you're still willing to give ListMail a chance. I understand that the issue you're having has affected you in a very frustrating manner.
You can email me at dean@listmailpro.com if you would prefer. I don't expect you to pay for assistance with this which is why I referred you to the "Other" type Tech Support request, which is free.
I understand your position regarding security and I normally would not need to access your server directly with administrator access.
To set you a little more at ease (I hope) I have done well over 250 installs with varying degrees of access (including admin/root access dozens of times). I also have 3 of my own dedicated servers running hosting for a select few clients (and therefore have no need to 'use' your server in any way). I am a firm believer in legitimate business being just as good (or better) than illegitimate business. My ListMailPRO business is my main source of income right now and I would never do anything to jeopardize my reputation. Please be assured that I will never touch anything unrelated to ListMailPRO. I may, however, notify you of any problems, hack attempts, etc. I stumble across in the logs while I'm investigating the ListMail issue.
If you would prefer, I can start by using FTP access to the domain along with ListMail access to do some testing. This way you would not be putting your entire server at "risk" (no offense taken - the only true security is to never give out your info). With just client access to the domain running ListMail I could use a simple test script to try to determine if the time limit in place on the server can be overridden. WIth this access I can also check for ListMail -> SMTP errors.
I understand that it would appear that ListMailPRO is the problem here. This is, however, out of a very large number of installations a very rare issue. The only thing ListMail can do is try to set the PHP limit to 0 (Unlimited). It will then be up to the server settings to ensure that the script runs as necessary. Please securely
submit FTP and ListMail info here so that I can get started ASAP.
The suggestion I made before (safe mode off) has solved the 30 second timeout issue in the majority of cases. The only time it might not help is if the server admin has placed a certain 'maximum running time' limit with an 'auto-kill' feature on the server to protect against runaway scripts. This is not uncommon on hosts running a very large number of sites/clients per server. Can you ask your technical support staff whether or not there is a hard limit on the amount of time a PHP script can run?
Regards
