Trying to understand Bulk Mail Cycle

[evcom]

Our community has around 1000 members, a little more than 800 signed up for a newsletter. Typically there are approx. 20-30 users online at a time. From what I understand, the frequency of background process is depending on community activity. Our SMTP Server can handle 250 mails/h, so I limited in constants.php the bulk mail to 5 mails/cycle, assuming a cycle every 2 minutes, we would not reach the sending limit.

\define ( 'BULK_MAILS_PER_CYCLE', 5 );

The ACP reported the following:


Does the above mean, the cycle was carried out every 30 seconds to deliver all mails in 1h and 31 minutes?
Would this be realistic? Or was the first cycle initiated 1h 31 mins after the bulk mail was launched?

And and additional question about the constants.php. Is it required to add a backslash before the define function? From what I read it will apply the function on a global level if added. 

Thanks to any pointer!

[bfarber]

The constant controls how many emails are sent per cycle but the software will still try to process as many cycles as it can in one go. The constant, in other words, is not going to work how you want it to. It's not intended to control the number of emails sent each time the task runs, it's meant to help control how many emails are sent each time we try to push the emails to the server - if your SMTP server is particularly slow, for instance, it may be able to handle 30 at a time but not 50.

[evcom]

Thanks @bfarber for this explanation. Now it makes more sense 🙂 

One thing that is still not clear to me: Many SMTP Providers have a daily sending limit. If I send a bulk mail to e.g. 1000 users, but my SMTP Provider allows for only 500 mails a day, would this cause any troubles (500 mail not sent) or would the remaining 500 mails be sent on the following day? I know, it's not directly related to the Community Suite or the Bulk Mail feature, but somehow its related to it. 

[CoffeeCake]

How your SMTP provider works is unknown--you'd have to ask them.

A relevant question may be what happens if the SMTP server returns an error? Does IPS try again or simply drop that mail?

[B_U_R_I]

Sorry for borrowing this topic 

Does any one know of a (cheap) mail sending service. We have a community with app. 2500 users and we would like to send a monthly newsletter (2000 subscribers). Otherwise we send out about 50 e-mails per day.

All of the services with free tiers I've found have a daily limit for sent e-mail. That wouldn't be a problem, except for the Bulk Email newsletter. All of the paid services usually start at 15$ per month and are in terms of e-mail limit totally over the top for us (40k e-mails).

What would you advise we could use?

[bfarber]

21 hours ago, Paul E. said:

How your SMTP provider works is unknown--you'd have to ask them.

A relevant question may be what happens if the SMTP server returns an error? Does IPS try again or simply drop that mail?

The error will be logged to the email error logs, but we will not automatically try to resend. You can attempt to manually resend individual failed emails from the email error logs.

[xtech]

This is a complaint/unfulfilled suggestion from several years ago: the possibility of define maximum number of emails per time (minute / hour / day / month). This would allow the email send request peaks to be flattened and bette balanced over time, which has many benefits.

It is very different from a spam classification point of view if you send 2000 emails in 2 minutes or 2000 emails in two days. In the first case, you may raise some flags which will then cause your email address and domain to be blacklisted and ignored by many email services.

Sorry being down to earth, but the bulk mail functionality as it is now serves basically... for nothing, because if you use it one or two times, your email address will get blacklisted, so your users will not even receive the registration confirmation emails.

Edited October 7, 2020 by xtech

[evcom]

@xtech From my perspective, the feature mentioned by you would make sense. Many SMTP providers limit the number of mails per day. Plus it would possibly bring many other benefits (less SPAM classifications). 

I've been using the bulk mail functionality for about half a year using the PHP delivery method. It worked ok, and I would say, transactional e-mails have not been affected so far (Community with 1000 members, one  monthly newsletter). Bulk Mails were usually sent within a few minutes, however not all were delivered due to no SPF, DKIM, etc.  

Now that the Community is growing, I would like to improve e-mail delivery, and I have switched to an SMTP provider. Currently I am testing delivery etc...

@B_U_R_I I've had exactly the same problem with a similar size of our Community. Most free plans have daily usage limits, making the solution a no go for sending e.g. a Bulk Mail with > 500 subscribers. 

I was looking at Mailgun, they have apparently no daily sending limit and a "pay as you go" plan which is very affordable. However, you would likely be on a probation period with < 100 Mails/day. I am using at the moment elasticemail. They also have a "pay as you go" plan (but you need to deposit a credit of 10 USD) to start. Otherwise a very affordable for smaller communities. No daily sending limit. 

Yesterday I've tried to send a Bulk Mail from within Invision Community. So far no Bulk Mail has been delivered, except during a test where I've sent the bulk mail content to one recipient. This one was delivered approximately after 6 hours. And interestingly, bulk mails do not appear in the elasticemail dashboard. Transactional mails seem to work just fine and are also listed. 

I will get in touch with the provider to better understand why bulk mails are not delivered resp. not displayed in the dashboard. 
If I can solve it, it would be worth a recommendation. Keep you posted. 
 

[evcom]

As far as my Bulk Mail sending problem is concerned, I was able to resolve it. 

Reason for not delivering Bulk Mail was, I've activated Send Grid as delivery method for all the Bulk Mails. This configuration can be found under
System > Site Features > Community Enhancements

This setting overrides anything you set in 
System > Settings > E-Mail Settings

Still, it would be awesome if Bulk Mails could be restricted to a certain limit/h for example.