Phplist Throttling :: How To ::

[GatorLBrower]

Originally Posted by odingalt

Hostgator sucks. Fantastico installs don't work. Period. I've tried about a dozen Fantastico installs and nothing works. Including PHP list.

Have you created a ticket regarding this so that we can look into it further and get it resolved? If so, can you please provide the ticket ID?

[hdgames]

thanks this has been an excellent help i needed that
do i need to keep my browser open the entire time until it send out all emails or it is fine to close it?
thanks again

[danilyn22]

I am experiencing the same problem. It only sent out the first "throttled" batch. I have made some changes and will set up a CRON Job. I want to finish the emailing that was started but never completed but can not find any information whether you can just requeue and it will continue to send without resending to the users who already received it. Any ideas on this.

[microsof]

Can someone explain please why the timing does not make sence. I changed the batch sending as suggested to 480. I then had a message to say one message had taken 15 hrs to send and yet 3200 emails were sent in an hour, not what i had wanted to happen. How can you set it up that only 200 emails are sent in an hour

cheers

Derek

[microsof]

Originally Posted by GatorShashank

Hello Folks,

I hope all of you must be aware of Hostgator's Mail policy. The policy urges all you phplist/mailing lists users to throttle your mailing lists to keep them under the 500 emails/hour limit.

I am presenting specific instructions on how you can tweak PHPList available through fantastico to obey the limit while sending mails preventing legitimate domains like "yahoo.com" from being bouncing back as "unroutable domains"

Here we go :

1. Locate the config file for your phplist installation.

If you have installed the script on your domain with URL like http://www.domain.com/list/ then the physical path will be :

/home/username/public_html/list/config/config.php

In FTP you could see

/public_html/list/config/config.php

2. Download this file to your local PC.

3. Edit the file in a text editor like notepad or wordpad.

4. Locate the section called as "batch processing".

5. Just below you will see some code like :

# define the amount of emails you want to send per period. If 0, batch processing
# is disabled
define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE",0);
 
# define the length of one batch processing period, in seconds (3600 is an hour)
define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD",3600);

These are the default settings. We will be replacing those to keep the mails under 200/hour.

Here is the code I suggest :

# define the amount of emails you want to send per period. If 0, batch processing
# is disabled
define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE",480);
 
# define the length of one batch processing period, in seconds (3600 is an hour)
define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD",3600);

These settings tell phplist to send 480 mails per hour. The remaining 20 emails per domain can be used for normal mailing operations if needed.

6. Save the file and ftp it back to its original location. Remember to take a backup of the original file just in case you mess up.

Now you should be able to send mails without any bounces and not overloading the mailserver.

Any additions to this article are always welcome :-)

I cannot understand why by saying a batch of 480 ensures less than 200 emails are sent in an hour or am i being slightly senior ;-)

Derek

[smithster]

It seams so many are confused as to how throttling works. I tried phplist and found it to be not very user friendly so I searched around for something else and came across already mentioned pommo. It works great and allows me to send emails to more than 500 users.

The way throttling works, isn't that it sends a whole 200 mails straight away and then waits an hour before sending another 200. If you set it to throttle and to send no more than 200 an hour, it works out how many seconds it should wait between the sending of each email.

Pommo is very easy to use in this case. You can set it to how ever many emails you want to be sent in one single hour. I'm on reseller so my limit is 500 emails per hour. I have my pommo settings set at 480 emails per hour. This means that it will space out the email sendings so that 8 emails are sent every minute. On shared hosting plans with a limit of 200 emails per hour, it's advised as already stated to set your limit at 180 which means 3 emails are sent every minute ensuring that you never go over the limit.

Also with pommo, once you start the mailing process, you can close your browser and the mailing will continue to send emails even if your computer is switched off. There is also no need for using cron with pommo.

Hope this helps.

[striddy]

Originally Posted by microsof

I cannot understand why by saying a batch of 480 ensures less than 200 emails are sent in an hour

A batch of 480 is less than 500. The limit is 500 not 200.

[pjeutr]

For people struggling with the cronjob
The command that worked for me was:

/usr/local/bin/php -c /home/MYUSERNAME/php.ini -q /home/MYUSERNAME/public_html/MYPATH/lists/admin/index.php USER=MYUSERNAME -p processqueue

important for me where:
/usr/local/bin/php to use the right php version
-c /home/MYUSERNAME/php.ini for some reason phpshell uses a cusomized php.ini (I suppose fantastico did that)

Just try different options at ssh and keep in mind that cron can use different environment vars, that's why I had to use the full path to php

[microsof]

Originally Posted by newview

I'm another who had major problems with the recommended config.php settings with the browser timing out and having to hit the processqueue link every hour. I'm definitely NOT going to do that.

I found that the following settings allow the browser to reload and begin the processqueue every 60 seconds. I was able to send 4 messages of about 1100 each in 4 days.

define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE",3);
define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD",60);
define('MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE',19);

So . . . that's 3 emails every 60 seconds, waiting 19 seconds between
emails. That computes to about 187 emails per hour, under the 200/hr limit.

Followed this but got the following message

Started
A process for this page is already running and it was still alive 120 seconds ago
Sleeping for 20 seconds, aborting will quit
Sending in batches of 3 emails
Sent in last run: 1
Skipped in last run: 0
<div id="dberror" style="position: relative;
background-color: #aa0000;
border: 2px solid #000000;
color: #ffffff;
">Database error 0 while doing query MySQL server has gone away</div>
Script stage: 1
Finished, Nothing to do
Finished, All done

I cannot get the list to send more than 6 emails beforeit dies :-(

[chicago]

My cron that works is based off of pjeutr, but also requires an environment variable to be set.

USER=<PHPListAdminUsername>; export USER; /usr/local/bin/php -c /home/<HostGatorUsername>/php.ini -q /home/<HostGatorUsername>/public_html/lists/admin/index.php USER=<PHPListAdminUsername> -p processqueue

This is for a situation where your PHPList Admin username is different from your HostGator account username. There are four places above that need to be changed for your situation.