Newsletter Throttle Wanted.

[draknet]

Would like a newsletter throttle built on to Soholaunch, will pay for development. Must have previous successful experience with Soholaunch Mods - "I'll try it" not going to work here., :)

If anyone is interested, please contact me - chat, skype, IM, email, PM, or smoke signals.

[ricster]

I've checked around and it's a hairy problem. The only "rigged" solution I've found is based on a scheduled server job (CRON job). I'd be happy to fork up some $ for a plugin if it helps sweeten the pot.

Thanks,

Ricster

[draknethosting]

For those looking, this is officially not going to come from Soholaunch.

Soholaunch.com, Inc said...
Unfortunately there is no way to build this into soholaunch because this depends on being able to set cronjobs from php which most server do not allow. Soholaunch does show the amount of recipients before the email is sent, but throttling the email sends is not in the cards at the moment.

I again reiterate the call for this - I'd also like to ask that this be made free or open source for all Soholaunch users and I would, again, be willing to pay for development work to any developers willing to sign on to the project on the condition that it be made free or open source. If you want to license it through Soholaunch add ons, I'll guaranty a server license purchase but I won't pay for development.

There is no reputable, decent host that does not have a limitation of some kind on mails sent from web scripts. This functionality is critical for sites with larger mailing lists on more hosting services than my own.

[cwb]

Interesting response from Soholaunch, "showing the amount of recipients" doesn't really address this problem. It does me little good to know my mailing is going to fail if there's not a way to make it succeed.

Recently, in dealing with this issue, I took a look at PHPlist to see how they implemented throttling. Seems they're able to add cron jobs during their setup, so I'm not sure why Soholaunch couldn't (admittedly I probably know enough about this to be dangerous). My understanding is that PHPlist is pretty broadly used, so maybe hosting security policies aren't that big an issue. PHPlist is open source, so it should be fairly easy to see how they're doing it.

If there are many people using the eNewsletter feature perhaps you should speak up if this is a problem for you. Seems to me if there's a significant market need, Soholaunch would want to be responsive to that need. If, on the other hand, eNewsletter is just a feature hardly anyone is using, why would they put resource into it? If that's the case, there are other free or inexpensive newsletter solutions I suppose I could look at.

[cica]

Draknet-

I PM'd you last week and never received a response. I have a workaround that would negate the need for Cron access. If you could be more specific about what you are looking for, I could probably help you.

-Tom

[PAontheweb]

Hey cica,
I'm looking for a possible work around too. I've got several clients that could benefit from this too.

[cica]

PAontheweb-

My Backup Plus plug-in is coded to run on the 1st day of every month. Since everyone doesn't have access to Cron, I coded the plug-in to test the current date against the last date stored in a table. When the first visitor in a new month browses to the site, if the plug-in is due (or overdue) to run, it fires off a small backup routine. This unnoticeable delay gets the job done.

In the case of newsletter throttling, I would suggest the plug-in be written in such a way as to have each visitor "fire off" a few emails when they browse to the site. As each email is sent, you would have a field in the table updated. I would probably suggest that the throttling either be controlled by the traffic statistics table, or set manually.

A couple of the settings should be:

# of emails sent at each visit (too many would slow the site)
days lapsed before sending subsequent emails to the same person

-Tom

[PAontheweb]

Interesting concept. The only issue I'm facing is the email newsletter list is going to be 50,000 and is for a high end client. This would not be acceptable. The other clients have over 2,000. That is really not a problem as we can set our server to any number or unlimited. We normally open it up to send the newsletter at a time of day when server traffic is low and then close it up after the list is sent.

[draknethosting]

Draknet-

I PM'd you last week and never received a response. I have a workaround that would negate the need for Cron access. If you could be more specific about what you are looking for, I could probably help you.

-Tom

I'm looking for something similar to PHPList's throttle/batch feature:

http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListConfigSendRate

This works perfectly for our clients, and PHPList is open source (http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php) and allows open source derived works, that tends to indicate if someone was willing to start with their code and modify it for Soholaunch and release it as an open source add on, modifying it to work here shouldn't be that hard.

If no one does, at some point I likely will but, frankly, I just don't have time for development work at the moment.

[Leblanc]

Oh, I've been waiting for a thread on this topic.

I don't mean to beg, but Pleeease, can someone develop this?

A PHPList's style throttle/batch feature is exactly the feature I'm looking for in my custom built sites to keep my clients from raising flags with there mailouts but, it's beyond me.

(I'm able to set crons in cPanel, if that helps)