I cannot find any information that defines some of the specific terms that are found on the STATISTICS OVERVIEW screen in phpList. I would think the terms are self-explanatory but the numbers that I see on the screen for those terms are not what I would expect.
The screen I am referring to is the one that appears when you click the bar graph for each campaign that appears on the Active and Sent tabs of the LIST OF CAMPAIGNS screen. I am attaching a screen capture of the list of terms that are used.
The intuitive view of these terms would be that if you added the totals from “Sent as HTML” and “Sent as text” you would get the same number as the one in the “Sent” field. However, this is never the case for me. The “Sent as HTML” number is always higher than the “Sent” number, often by a considerable margin.
Is there a standard definition for how the system calculates the data that appears next to these terms?
Will check with my network guy to see if there is anything funny on the MX side.
In the meantime, the mantis ticket indicates, “…that was because the MX we had assigned was non-existent. While the mx was unreachable the number of mails in the sent box kept duplicating…”
Was this a problem that the user fixed by correcting the MX record? Do you know if it was it a one-time config problem?
it was fixed when we corrected the mx yes. we were testing some systems, I wasn’t running the tests though, just assisting. I think they put in like mx5 when it should have been mx05 or something, and I then noticed the sent count piling up.
After reviewing the MX record feedback with my network administrator, this is definitely not our issue. Also, it is not testing related. The data below is representative of what I commonly see on the Statistics Overview page:
Sent as HTML 44460
Sent as text 0
Not sent 1490
Sent 35836
@mtasmithjk@anna I’ve just seen similar figures, the numbers for total sent, html, and text being wildly inconsistent and way bigger than the number of people in the list being sent to.
I guess that phplist is counting attempts to send, rather than successful sends. In some cases phplist will try to send again to a failed email address, thus leading to inflated totals.
When looking at campaign statistics I think that the figures should reflect the successful sends. The number of failures can also be useful but only as a separate figure.
I believe that you are right. I have been seeing this in my campaigns, not because there is a failed email address, but because we are seeing phpList event log data that indicates “Error sending to xyz email.” I brought this up in a prior forum post:
The errors are not happening because the emails are bad. Due to the lack of detailed logging information in phpList, we aren’t sure why the errors are occurring. We are now setting up a separate MTA to funnel our campaigns through in the hope that we can get more detailed logging information. I agree that phpList should have a separate stat for failed attempts and not combine them with the sent as HTML numbers.
