On Feb 14, 2010, at 2:16 PM, John Collins wrote:

Quick question first: If a mass mailing is started with a certain set of settings are the settings encapsulated in the email?

No

What I mean is, if the sending is paused and settings are changed and the sending is started again, does it continue with the original settings or does it adopt the new settings? (Example: smtp to sendmail, batches to non-batches)

It depends if the process is still running Things that make the process stop running, in this case, is if you ask it to, "pause" the message If you pause a message, make the change and then start the mailing again, in the time it takes between batches - in your case, 10 seconds, the original settings will still be in effect

looking for possible mail server problems

I'm not going to be much help on mail server stuff - I see mail servers as just a black box that Dada Mail can give things to

I have "Fast CGI" enabled in the site control panel

Dada Mail doesn't use Fast CGI, so this isn't going to have much effect

They modiifed the "sendmail mc " file to and changed "define(confMAX_QUEUE_RUN_SIZE',1500')" from 200 to 1500

Things like this - I have no idea if this is a good thing, or a bad thing to do It sounds like a good thing, but what's the feature there in there first place?

FWIW, when clicking the "Batch Sending Options" in Mass Mailing Preferences, the dialog states "Messages will be sent at a rate of up to 144,000 Messages/Hour Mailing to 29074 subscribers will take at least 12 minutes, 6 seconds "

You do understand that this doesn't take in any estimate on what sending individual messages is going to be, right? It's just counting the times between batches - that's why it says, "At least" and not, "at the most", or just simply, "It will take" I can't estimate the actually time it'll take, because the mail server will take time and I have no idea what that time is But,

Say it takes 3 seconds for Dada Mail to send out a message, from grabbing the email address needed, to templating out the message, to merging any subscriber-specific info into the message, giving it to the mail server and having it send out (that last part may be a little slice of a second - I don't know) So, you've got, 29,000 subscribers:

29,000 x 3 seconds = 87000 seconds

87000 seconds / 60 / 60 = 24 16 hours

So, that's my guess There's two features in Dada Mail that can make this faster One is the,

Adjust Sleep Time

feature, that tries to remove some of the time actual message sending takes from the batch time, so that the sending time for the entire mailing list is more similar to the estimate Since you have such a huge batch, and such a small batch time, you're not going to see much difference

The other is

Use One SMTP Connection per Batch (Experimental)

Which allows you to send a batch with just one connection to the mail server Probably supposed to be faster, since you skip the connect/disconnect parts I wouldn't do it with a batch of 400 Maybe more like 30

You can see how fast messages can send out in Dada Mail by changing the $MASS_MAIL_SETTINGS from their default:

$MASS_MAIL_SETTINGS = "|$MAILPROG -t";

to,

$MASS_MAIL_SETTINGS = ">>$LOGS/test_mail
txt";

(Put those two lines in your dada_config file)

That'll just write the email messages you want to send to a file, instead of to the mail server Set your list to use sendmail, test to make sure the emails aren't being sent out, but rather being written to this file and when you're all ready, send out a message, as normal You're regular email messages - subscriptions/unsubscriptions and the finishing email notification will still be sent - so send a test message to the list owner - that should be written to the file

Whatever speed Dada Mail can send things out, is the top speed you'll probably ever be able to get

Subtract that speed from another sending, hopefully, using the same list, message, etc and you have the time it takes for Dada Mail to talk to the mail server

My guess is that Dada Mail going through the addresses and writing out the emails will be pretty fast, but not blazing - how fast is it to just template out an admin screen (it's the same templating engine!), and the mail server will be a little slower Just a guess, though