Browser-based Batch Processing Won't Proceed

ℹ️ Support
1

I’ve been having a very frustrated problem the last 2 weeks. I have a 2500+ member list whom I inform of weekly Theatre events in the area. For over a year, I had it throttled back, using these settings (360/hour, seemingly a reasonable figure to avoid being considered spam):

define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,60);
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,600);
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,2);

Starting with last week’s email, I immediately started getting “Access denied. Your IP address is blacklisted”. I’d wait a while, the error would disappear, and I’d manually restart. Very frustrating. HostGator blamed my ISP (ATT U-Verse), but that was not it: the problem happened from any machine on any wifi network. Talked to HostGator tech last night, and we looked at my phpconfig. I set SIZE & PERIOD back to 200/hour, and he suggested THROTTLE should be 8 seconds. I cranked it back up.

Now the batch doesn’t seem to produce the blacklist error (hard to imagine offending anyone at this throttled, nay, strangled speed :slight_smile:). BUT, the batch, after starting, never proceeds to the next batch. Just sits there with the Cylon back-and-forth “I’m working” status bar, and shows the current message stats. Eg,

Started
Sending in batches of 40 emails
Processing has started, 1 message(s) to process.
Please leave this window open. You have batch processing enabled, so it will reload several times to send the messages. Reports will be sent by email to charlesgpuckett@gmail.com
Processing message 311
Looking for users
Found them: 714 to process

My current settings are:

define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,40);
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,720);
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,6);

(I pulled back from 8 seconds when the batch stopped proceeding just to see if that had an effect.)

I REALLY need to sort this out. No way I can babysit 2500 list members at 40/pop.

Any suggestions? I’m kinda desperate at the moment.

Tnx,
Chuck Puckett
"I don’t want to steal the show… I only want to borrow it for a while."

2

I’d suggest that you setup a cron job to automatically send and process the bounces. That way, when you create a campaign, it starts automatically and continues until it’s done, and you can close your browser.

3

Well, that would be swell. I’ve not dealt with cron for 20 years (Unix) and never on Windows. Is this something I set up on my local machine, or on the host site (HostGator)? Can you point me to a tutorial?

Also: can you see anything in these settings that would cause such disparate behavior?

4

For hostgator, the total # emails that you can send includes all of your regular emails, and the batch count, and the ‘goodbye’ messages, etc.

hostgator might have a qty per hour, AND a sending RATE… for instance sending 10,000 emails/hr for 60 seconds is 167 emails sent. hostgator might limit the sending rate, i.e. only allow you to send 200 emails in an hour (3600 seconds), so to spread that out evenly over an hour, that is 1 email every 18 seconds…