Increase sending speeds of newsletters / mailing campaigns by 50%
How ?
Simply hide the Delivery Console display during the sending process (click the Hide button). There is a lot of detailed progress information being displayed here and this takes valuable processing time away from the actual delivery process.
In our test, sending to a group of 25,300 recipients using 1 connection to the mail server, reconnecting every 50 messages for 5 seconds, hiding the delivery console increased the send rate from 9,270 messages per hour to 13,875 per hour. That is a time saving of almost an hour over the course of the mailing, reducing the overall time from less than 3 hours to less than 2 hours for the full mailing.
When the Delivery console is hidden to view the progress of the mailing, simply right-click on its icon in the task bar and choose “Delivery Console Status” to make it visible again.
Also if using the Subscriber Add-on to process inbound messages (bounces, opt-in and opt-out requests etc.), minimise the Subscriber Add-On window and hide the “Subscriber Progress” screens to get similar performance gains.
[...] Great news for GroupMail users. Our new GroupMail blog is already churning out some useful and practical tips. Read Increase sending speeds of newsletters/mailing campaigns by 50% [...]
Hi, Jonathan.
My I put an improvement suggestion for the Blog ?
The poster would be allowed to receive an e-Mail notification if an answer of a post would be provided.
I’d like to be aware of the GM discussions.
Thanks,
Miguel
Is there any plans to improve the Group Mail sending mechanism to allow the use of more then one SMTP for one personalized message sent to a group of addresses ?
TIA,
Miguel
Miguel, thanks for the feedback, sorry about the delay getting back to you, thought I was supposed to get an email when a comment was made, will need to check into this, and yes I take your point that it would be useful for you too.
Regarding your send settings and the length of time taking to send, I am not sure that allowing GM to send to multiple SMTP servers simultaneously is the solution here as that introduces the potential for more problems.
It sounds as though the issue here is the limit placed by your ISP, and changing the send block or interval will not solve that, have you spoken to them regarding getting another account with a higher send limit ?
Hi
I have the same trouble as Miguel in his first post. My ISP has this limit that does not adjust to the allowed pre-configured limits in GroupMail. A type-in option would be most useful (in message amount as well as in waiting time).
Mauricio
Should I be using Direct Send, or Standard for my emails to be the most effective in reaching as many people as possible? I’m not really sure I understand the difference.
Mike, I would recommend Standard send mode for higher delivery rates, the differences between the two are described here http://www.group-mail.com/asp/common/articles.asp?id=192
Miguel/Mauricio, First of the current version of GroupMail does allow you to type in the number of messages sent between pauses (for the lat two years at least), so if your ISP limits to 30 messages per minute you could send 30 messages then pause for a minute, currently I guess you send 25 messages and pause for a minute so the gain is relatively small, and would still take 22 hours plus for a mailing of 40,000 recipients. This is still a long time for a best case scenario. At a guess, if it were an option to get an account with a more appropriate send limit, GroupMail would send a mailing of this size through most ISP’s in less than 4 hours. For an optimized system a mailing of this size could be sent in a matter of minutes using GroupMail.
What I am trying to understand here, OK there are some marginal gains to be had tweaking the settings, but the fundemental problem here is the ISP send limit. Do you know if your ISP offers accounts with higher send limits ? If they do is the cost of it prohibitive ? If not are you somehow tied to this provider or have you considered alternatives ?
Hello Dave,
Thank you for your answers. Unfortunately my ISP doesn’t have today a schedule for mass sending of messages. Being so, there would be useful to gain any supposedly marginal increase of speed and volume.
My concerns about the search for another provider is connected with trust for my data safety. There are several ISP that offers unlimited volume and speed, but require for me to expose the database list. This is entirely unacceptable, because it would jeopardize my professional customer relationship from twelve years.
Thanks,
Miguel
OK I understand, I will email you directly with details on how to obtain the latest version of GroupMail, this should help reducing the time taken to send.
Dave,
I just sent out an email using my GroupMail Business Edition, but two thirds of the emails “Failed”. I was using “Direct” send. My web host provider (which is different from my ISP) hosts my business site, but they do not support bulk email through their servers, so I have been using Direct send. Today, I went ahead and leased a dedicated server. It can handle my bulk email without any problems according to the tech person I spoke to.
My question is, how can I obtain the best success rate for getting my emails to my customers now that I have a dedicated server? I assume I should use Standard send mode? Also, my business domain (which is where my emails are said to come “From”) is different from my new dedicated smtp server. Is this going to cause a problem with some mail servers that insist that my “From” address match the server smtp address that I am using? Should I assume that I now have a static IP address, and a reverse DNS address?
Thanks,
Mike
Mike, Ok I am assuming you have a static IP on your dedicated server(verify this woth your provider), and that you are going to run an SMTP server on this box, in this scenario, you need to update your dns records to reflect that this server is a part of your business, I presume your business site host provides access to your DNS records so I believe you will need to
1. Add an “A” record linking the name of this server lets say mail.yourbusinessdomain.com to its dedicated IP address
2. Add an MX record specifying mail.yourbusinessdomain.com as a mail server for your business
3. Optionally configure “Sender Policy Framework”, I believe its added as a Text record on your DNS
On your SMTP mail server you will need to specify the same name mail.yourbusinessdomain.com as the server name (basically the name that is used by the server in the HELO command when initiating communication with another server)
For the reverse DNS setup, I am not familiar with this process, but as you are leasing the dedicated from a provider, I assume you are also leasing the IP address, so I would guess that you will need to get them to add a reverse IN-ADDR entry in the domain in-addr.arpa domain that points back to the mail.yourbusinessdomain.com host.
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Dave
If you are having issues with mail delivery to Hotmail you should check out the Hotmail / MSN postmaster site for tips.
A lot of the issues arise from things like malformed headers, which you won’t have with Groupmail, but others can be caused by the lack of an SPF record or a bad reverse DNS entry.
I wouldn’t worry about the HELO – it has zero effect on mail delivery unless you are spoofing someone else’s mail server
The MX record shouldn’t be an issue either unless you are receiving as well as sending.
Michele
Thanks for the input Michele, we’ve included some links to the policies of a number of ISPs at the end of this document http://www.group-mail.com/asp/common/articles.asp?id=229
Mike I forgot to include this link for setting up your SPF record http://www.openspf.org/
Dave and Michele,
Thanks. This is helpful. I have another question: I know that some ISPs limit the amount of mail that you can send (say, 100 per hour). I do not have this problem with my dedicated server. But my question is, do some ISPs limit the amount of email they will RECEIVE if it is coming from the SAME source? For example, if I have 500 customers and they are all gmail.com users, is it possible that my mail will be stopped by gmail because they see that I am contacting 500 of their customers within a short span of time?
Mike
Also, what do you think about the following: the tech support person for my dedicated server said that he can remove my Reverse DNS Lookup and this would speed my email up and help me with delivery as well. Is this true?
Mike
Its unlikely an ISP will limit the amount of incoming email based on the number alone, if the content scores badly on the content filters, there are a high percentage of non existing addresses or a number of recipients mark it as junk / spam, then sure it is possible they will block the source.
About the “remove my Reverse DNS Lookup” “would speed my email up and help me with delivery as well”, I am not sure where they are coming from with this. If your server was processing incoming email, and was doing a reverse lookup on the sources of the mail, then disabling this could have an positive impact on performance. Though I fail to see how this would help with delivery though.
Dave
[...] GroupMail customers have a need for speed. Delivering to large lists of recipients takes time, especially when you’re dealing with non-optimal environments. In a previous post on this blog, we discussed how hiding the GroupMail Delivery Console can help to speed up delivery. Another way to get things moving a little faster is using Bulk Sending instead of Personlized Sending. I asked Honor Doyle from Infacta’s technical support team a few questions about Bulk Sending: Tom: Hi Honor. I’ve had a few calls recently from customers looking to turbo-charge their delivery with GroupMail. I’ve read about Bulk Sending, but I’m not really sure about how it differs from Personalized Sending. Could you explain? Honor: Bulk Sending or BCC’ing only ever sends one message to your SMTP server and then it sends the list of addresses to distribute the message to. For this example lets enter 10 recipients per message. This basically means that for every 1 message sent from GroupMail it will go to 10 recipients. The default is 10 recipients per message and 100 is the maximum number of recipients per message.With Personalized Send Mode, it sends an individual message for each recipient in your Group. These messages can be personalized using the Merge Fields, for example ‘Dear First Name’ etc.. which is not available with the Bulk Send Mode. [...]
Hi Dave,
I am using Standard mode for faster delivery of email. The problem I found is that for a particular mail I am sending now, the recipients do not receive it. But General Status Log says it was successfully delivered. When try using ‘Direct’, with that same content, it was received. Why is that so? It will supposed to be ok using Direct in this case but sending, I find, is slower than using Standard. Is this really happening?
Hi Annie, whatever about the speed, usually sending in standard mode through a mail server gives you a better chance of successful delivery. Maybe there is something in the email that is causing the server to filter it (maybe a false positive with the virus scan) or a html tag like an iframe that it is flagged as a security risk. Is there a send restriction on the mail server ? Although usually in such cases where a send limit is exceeded there is something to indicate this in the log file.
Please feel free to send in the log files to support [at] infacta.com and we will investigate further. Sending in the actual message may be useful also, to do this go to the sent messages, Edit Copy of Message and choose View-> Rich Text (HTML) Source, send in the contents as an attachment.
where can i get a SMTP to send unlimited emails. because without that this software seems to be worthless.