I am new to PHPlist and email marketing. I’ve been studying PHPlist and testing for the last week or so and it worked well in my small tests. I thought I had it figured out, but now that I’ve sent my first real campaign, I’ve hit my first obstacle…
I have a list of 3,170 subscribers. I created a campaign for that list, put it in the queue, then clicked process. After a short wait, it said it finished processing – and I got the email notifications that said the campaign started and finished – but the processing report said it processed 5 of 5 subscribers. I double-checked the list and it shows 3,170 members.
When I later returned to my list of campaigns, this campaign doesn’t appear in the SENT or ACTIVE list – it’s in the DRAFT list. But when I select the VIEW action for that item, it says the campaign was sent to subscribers of the list I assigned to it (but it really only sent 5 emails). If the campaign was sent, why would it be in the Draft list? It feels like something is very wrong.
Also, I set the throttle to 15 (seconds) in the config per the instructions of my hosting company, if that matters. That’s the only change I made to the config file.
I was hoping to send this campaign over night but that isn’t going to happen – I’m exhausted.
I hope someone will be able to clue me in tomorrow.
Thank you in advance!
You might want to look at your list, and make sure that everyone is confirmed. If they are not confirmed, they will not be sent an email.
If they are not, you can install @duncanc 's plugins and confirm them manually
Install this one first:
“Common” plugin, it’s required for the subscriber’s plugin
https://github.com/bramley/phplist-plugin-common/archive/master.zip
and this one second:
“Subscriber’s plugin”
https://github.com/bramley/phplist-plugin-subscribers/archive/master.zip
Thank you for the reply. They were all confirmed. I ended up deleting all my subscribers and importing them fresh last night (these were also all confirmed). It seems it MAY be working now – or at least it may have gotten farther. I still haven’t gotten the email that tells me the campaign started.
I’m including screenshots of the queue processing (QP) page and the campaign list (CL) page. The QP has been displaying “processing message 4” for several hours, but I’ve gotten 13 undeliverable email notices and 1 unsubscribe. The undeliverables don’t show on the CL as bounce backs. When I refresh the CL, the number of views update (they are now at 237), but the number of messages sent do not so it seems to have stopped sending/processing.
That CL also says 769 messages were delivered, but with my throttle at 15, that’s only arounand a message per hour rate that) and it’s already been over 8 hours since I started the queue.
Does this all seem normal? As I mentioned, this is my first campaign so I’m not quite sure what to expect.
The QP page says to leave the window open so I’m reluctant to close it if it means starting from scratch. Is there something I should do to continue sending? I may give it another hour just to see if the CL updates the number of messages sent.
Thanks again!
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UPDATE: The CL page is now updating to show message counts as they send and a message per hour rate that varies. But it is moving VERY slowly. It looks like it will take two or three times longer than my original estimate. The QP page still appears to remain static except for the animated logo.
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I’d still recommend that you setup a cron job for handling the sending.
If you are sending an email every 15 seconds, it will take over 3 days to send 2400… a cron job would be best to handle the sending.
Will the cron job make it go faster? Is there a page where it explains how to set up a cron job for a non-programmer like me? I’m having difficulty with the instruction page that covers this.
Unless I misunderstood what you were communicating, one email every 15 seconds is actually 240 per hour and 5,760 per day, isn’t it? My list is under 3,200 so it should have finished in a day but it took around two days. The status on the Campaign List page was hovering at around 130 emails per minute whenever I looked at it. Even at that rate, it should have finished a lot sooner.
When I sent my campaign, I didn’t have a batch number defined. Could that be the problem? I have since set that to 240 so I’m hoping the next campaign will go faster.
The cron job won’t make the system send any faster, it just checks the queue periodically, and starts sending if (there is campaign that in the queue and ready to send, and if it has sent fewer than the batch count in the last batch period).
Thank you.
Should I set up the cron job to check every hour? (That’s assuming I can figure out how to do it.)
i’d set it to run either every 5 or 10 mintues
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I finally got it all figured out. Turns out my hosting already had a cronjob set up for processing the queue when they installed phpList. I just had to change the frequency (I think they had it at once a day). I then replicated and tweaked the same settings for another cronjob to process bounces hourly. All seems to be working well now. Thank you for the pointers.
Glad to hear you got the system working well. Good work!
