Asked By
Maximilian
30 points
N/A
Posted on - 05/30/2011
I have a website that I maintain for a client. It is a newsletter portal. Every month the website sends an email of the current newsletters published for the month. We have a client base of around five thousand email addresses. The newsletter is sent out on the last working day of each month.
We are experiencing a tremendous slowness when sending out emails in comparison to last year. Sometimes the newsletters reach the client after three days. Is there any method to speed up the process ?
Answered By
Magnus
0 points
N/A
#111274
Sending email newsletters to clients from my php website
To send emails, you need a mail server. Each email is first sent to the mail server and then subsequently gets delivered to the end recipient. The email is queued upon receipt, at the email server. This causes a delay in sending the email out. The delay in receiving the email address, is always debated when using "email blaster" software for newsletter sites. Even though they claim that each email gets delivered to the end recipient, they cannot guarantee as to when it will reach the end recipient.
Emails are "connection less" messaging. In this sense it's "fire and forget" type of a messaging format. You will never know when it will reach the recipient unless, the recipient really acknowledges the email. I believe you are sending too many emails at once to your email server. The server gets inundated with so many emails that it might drop out certain emails or defer delivery based on priority.
You might want to talk to your Internet Service Provider, who provides the email server and see if they could give more priority.
Answered By
Garrod
0 points
N/A
#111275
Sending email newsletters to clients from my php website
The email size might be too big, for quick processing. Your newsletters may have big images and too many texts. This will cause the size of each email to grow.
Imagine sending five thousand emails of one hundred kilobytes each. This amounts up to one hundred mega bytes of data transferring from your server towards the mail server. Subsequently, its around one thousand mega bytes of data from the mail-server up to the end recipient mail servers.
You need to know that emails actually get delivered to the destination mail server, that provides email addresses to your clients. Each email address domain is associated to a server. One server may serve multiple domain email accounts. When you send emails out, Â your email server is actually "passing" your message to the destination mail box.
What I can suggest is, check if you are sending big images or large text on your newsletters.
Sending email newsletters to clients from my php website
The newsletters do have images embedded in it. I checked the size of each email and it is around eight to five kilobytes on an average. The problem is, I cannot make the images any smaller and I am using the smallest possible size. I am sending the email message one by one, individually, to the recipients to prevent spam.
Given the options what can I do ?
Answered By
Garrod
0 points
N/A
#111277
Sending email newsletters to clients from my php website
Sorting the destination email addresses would be helpful. Since you are sending email individually to each recipient, it is good if you can bunch the newsletters depending on the destination domain name. This will help your mail server. Doing a sort operation, you are going to ensure that emails, that match the same domain is pushed as a batch to your mail server.
Using the sorting option, you are helping your mail server, as the mail server can use its cached list of destination mail address frequently for a group of emails that has the same domain name. You will be reducing the domain lookup time in the email server, as it could use its cache to send the group of emails at once.
In event your client base has a email address originating from the same domain name, sorting and sending them first would be most helpful.
Sending email newsletters to clients from my php website
Sorting emails and grouping them looks like a good idea. I will try it out and let you know on the performance. I took a quick look at the domain addresses of the emails. Most of them are from common email providers such as Yahoo and Gmail. Therefore, by grouping them I came across eleven distinct domain names!
Answered By
Magnus
0 points
N/A
#111279
Sending email newsletters to clients from my php website
Grouping the emails by domain name and their email server MX record IP would be a best option. This is a far more advanced technique. On the Internet, multiple email domains are serviced by one mail server. This means that even though there are thousands of domain names out there, you will find that all of them might only be using ten to fifteen mail servers. If you could further group them via their respective mail box IP addresses, it would be more efficient.
MX record, defines the Mail Exchange server record for the domain name. You can get this via a name server lookup. I would suggest that when a client registers their email address, programmatically do a web lookup for the MX record and store the respective mail server IP. This would be a good way to bunch the mails up.
Sending email newsletters to clients from my php website
Grouping the emails by the destination domain name, seems to be the best option for now. Thank you experts for your suggestions. I will try the advanced technique when I get the time. It really looks possible! Thank you again!
