Some advice for correct configuration of sending rate

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1

Hello,

I would be very happy to get some advices to configure correctly the sending rate of my newsletters. I’m lost reading the docs, I don’t really understand what are the best practices (or the best practice I should adopt in my situation)…

I send campaigns mostly with browser and sometimes with CRON (when they are planned).
I have about 15.000 mails to send for each campaign. I have my own VPS without any sending limit but I think I don’t want to send more that 2 or 3 emails per second to avoid to be classified as spammer (and avoid overloading of my vps). For now I have the following configuration :

define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE",7200); 
define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD",3600);
define('MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE',0.5);

I’m wondering about some things :

  1. at that speed of 3 emails per second, 15000 emails are sent in 84 minutes (at least). So should I set MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD to a higher value than one hour to have my campaing fully automatically sent ?

  2. what is the difference of these setting with these one :

    define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,120);
    define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,60);
    define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’,0.5);

??

Many thanks for your help…

Best regards,

Trucmuche

2

It is simplest to use only a throttle value without batch settings.

define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE",0); 
define("MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD",3600);
define('MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE',0.5);```

When using a cron job phplist will continue sending until it has completed.
When sending through the browser phplist will use a default batch size (I think 1000), but you should use this approach only for sending to a relatively small number of subscribers.

Configure your cron job to run frequently, say every 5 minutes. When you send a new campaign you will need to wait only until the next run of the cron job for it to start to be sent.
3

Hello Duncanc !

Thank you very much for your answer.

For my regular newsletters, I have about 15000 subscribers which is not (i think) a relatively small number of subscribers… so you’re telling me to use only cron jobs to send all my newsletters, aren’t you ?

Thanks again,

Trucmuche

4

yes, this would make sense - even if you have a few thousand a cron can be worth it, otherwise you have to sit there with your browser open all the time when you send.

5

Why does everybody only refer to sending via cron jobs and browsers?
Is there some aversion to using SSH that I am unaware of?

php -q index.php -p processqueue > /dev/null
6

Obviously the benefit of running the command through ssh or a cron job is the same. But a cron job, by definition, runs on a regular schedule which is necessary when using batch processing.

Addtionally many hosting accounts, such as my own shared hosting, do not provide ssh access.
I guess that you are more of an advanced user than many using phplist.

1 Like
7

I hadn’t thought of neither batch processing requirements, nor lack of ssh access.
Thanks for clearing that up.

8

yes also I think a cron is something that less technical people can do at a stretch, with help, one time… but ssh is a whole other thing :slight_smile: