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Messages - Stefaans

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1
General Help & How-To / Pleske versus cPanel (send speed & stability)
« on: September 27, 2007, 01:01:18 pm »
I have no experience with Plesk, but am using ListMail Pro on two cPanel servers. And things are working well.

The particular servers are dedicated to a newsletter with a large subscriber base, so we go all out for maximum performance. On a "normal" cPanel / Plesk server you would probably be sharing the server amongst many websites, so full-throttle would probably not be an option.

By themselves, Plesk and cPanel does not influence the performance of ListMail Pro. It really is about the mail server software (Exim in the case of cPanel) and how it is configured. I used suggestions on this forum to tweak Exim a bit for better performance. The configuration is bit different to (dare I say "incompatible" with) the way that cPanel configures it.

2
We are using an external page for new subscriptions that posts to the signup.php script. Today I found that a new user with an dot in his email address could not subscribe. There are no error messages, but the address is not present in the database either. I then found the database already contains the same address, but with an underscore instead of a dot. For some reason MySQL sees the two as the same address and therefore does not create a new subscriber.

To illustrate a bit more: first_last@domain.com already existed in the database. Trying to subscribe first.last@domain.com does nothing. However, after deleting first_last@domain.com from the database, I can add first.last@domain.com.

I debugged the signup.php script and can confirm that the INSERT statement uses the correct email address. Therefore, this is not a ListMail Pro bug but a MySQL weirdness.

Is there a setting in MySQL that causes this behaviour?

Thanks for your comments.

3
General Help & How-To / 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by it
« on: December 07, 2006, 08:06:01 pm »
I too (actually, my client) have encountered the 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself error message. In spite of the error message, the list seems to be sending just fine.

The error message appeared after resuming the list at message 0 of XXXX. This is a dedicated server (cPanel and Exim) hosting ListMail only, with no limit on the number of emails per hour. I could find no further clues in the mail server log.

From what I can gather, the process of sending a line with "." only, is the standard way of ending an SMTP session. My guess is that this is simply a case of the connection with the remote server being dropped. This is quite probably in our scenario as list has many international subscribers (slow connections, time-outs, etc.). These are probably an isolated incident and no reason for concern. ;)

4
General Help & How-To / Having trouble delivering to Yahoo lately?
« on: November 15, 2006, 09:53:01 am »
DW, you are not mentioning Domainkeys or SPF records. Since Domainkeys is Yahoo's own initiative to combat SPAM, it is probably a good idea to set it up if you are sending lots of emails to them. And setting up an SPF record in addition to that will not hurt either  :wink:

5
General Help & How-To / Problems installing on Windows XP
« on: September 02, 2006, 12:34:29 pm »
I have installed ListMailPro on my local PC so that I can test some code modifications. (BTW I am doing the modifications with DW's permission ;)). During installation, when populating the tables with the example date, I got an Error inserting example config data.

After hacking around a bit, I managed to drill down to the underlying problems in editconf.php:

When doing the INSERT for $ctable (lm_config), I got ERROR 1366 (HY000): Incorrect integer value: '' for column 'id' at row 1. The error seems to be assigning the value "TRUE" to a char(1) field. My modified code is as follows:
Code: [Select]
$cmd="INSERT INTO $ctable VALUES ('$xid' ,'' ,'' ,'".date("Y-m-d H:i:s",time()-31536000)."' ,
'admin@$dom' ,'http://www.$dom$d/' ,'!' ,'link_' ,'10;desc;dadd' ,'1' ,'65' ,'$current_version' ,'' ,'
mail.$dom' ,'110' ,'bounce@$dom' ,'bounce@$dom' ,'' ,'0' ,'500' ,'4' ,'500' ,'3:30' ,'localhost' ,'25' ,'
1' ,'you@$dom' ,'' ,'1000' ,'1;0' ,'mail.$dom' ,'110' ,'you' ,'' ,'19' ,'0' ,'30' ,'60' ,'10' ,'10' ,'
1;0;0;0;0' ,'50;5000;10' ,'' ,'1');";


Next, when doing the $ktable (lm_links) INSERT, the error was ERROR 1366 (HY000): Incorrect integer value: '' for column 'id' at row 1. This is due to setting the an empty string value to mediumint( 8 ) field. My modified code is as follows:

Code: [Select]
$cmd="INSERT INTO $ktable VALUES ('','ex1','Example 1','ftp://ftp.ex.com/pub/download.zip','1');";
echo "Inserting example link data.<br>";
mysql_query($cmd) or die("**Error inserting example link data.<br>$cmd");


Finally, I ran into the session problem with Windows XP discussed in another thread. The solution provided in that thread solved my login problem.

I don't know if all of the above are Windows XP related, or rather related to my specific setup of MySQL or the specific version 1.87 of ListMailPro. Either way, I hope my post may be of value to someone else ;)

6
Quote from: "DW"
# 1k per 1M ram
# http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mysql/article.php/3367871
# named read_rnd_buffer_size in MySQL 4
# default was way too low
set-variable = record_rnd_buffer=512k

Minor typo: I think record_rnd_buffer should be read_rnd_buffer_size ;)

7
Server Optimization, Tweaks / Mailing list 100,000 and up
« on: August 13, 2006, 01:41:10 pm »
Quote from: "DW"
There is one further optimization that may not be in effect on your installation: Try adding an index on the id field of the lm_sendq table with PhpMyAdmin.

My apologies for resurrecting an old thread, but I need clarification.

I am using ListMailPro version 1.87. Looking at the lm_senq table, it seems like there is already a primary key for the id column set up. So, do I take it to be optimized already?

8
General Help & How-To / SMTP slower than PHP mail method?
« on: August 12, 2006, 02:00:18 pm »
Thanks, these are all helpful replies.

DW: The likely cause of the "slow" transmissions is that the server resides in the USA and the subscribers on the other side of the Atlantic in South Africa. We are doing this to avoid a huge bandwidth bill. That's another story I will not bore you with now ;) Probably around 20% of emails go to the queue. I think the reason for that is two-fold: delays in delivery (because of the geographic issue) and high server load (I am pushing as hard I can). I can see that with a big mail queue goes a high IOwait and a decrease in speed. Some of the emails in the queue ultimately bounce. So, I expect this issue to improve somewhat as bounced users are eventually removed.

listmailpro: Thanks for the technical explanation. I will stick to SMTP for reliability, even if it means a slower rate.

I am currently looking at other ways to speed up things, like using a second server. Thanks again for your perspectives.

9
General Help & How-To / SMTP slower than PHP mail method?
« on: August 02, 2006, 06:42:28 am »
Everywhere I read, the advice is to use SMTP for the fastes possible sending of lists. My experience so far has been the opposite...

We are hosting a newsletter with 600,000 subscribers for a client. I am seeing a sending rate of about 5,5500 emails per hour using the SMTP method. When switching to the PHP mail() method, the rate goes up to about 7,500 per hour. Why is SMTP not doing better?

Previously, we used DADA Mail for the newsletter. I had a similar experience there with SMTP being slower. So this is not a ListMailPro problem. If anything, our system needs tweaking.

We are using a dedicated server for the newsletter. It runs cPanel with Exim mail server. I prefer sending out messages as ListMailPro generates them, rather than queing them for later delivery. Here are all the SMTP and queue related settings in /etc/exim.conf:
Code: [Select]
#
#smtp settings
smtp_accept_max = 0
smtp_accept_queue_per_connection = 0
smtp_connect_backlog = 50
#
#queue settings
split_spool_directory = yes
queue_run_in_order = no
remote_max_parallel = 5
queue_run_max = 5
queue_only_load = 5


Any suggestions for tweaking SMTP for better performance? Thanks ;)

10
General Help & How-To / Logging options?
« on: July 25, 2006, 12:31:50 pm »
Thanks, that is a good start ;)

11
General Help & How-To / Logging options?
« on: July 24, 2006, 10:51:28 pm »
Hi all. I am new here  :D

I was wondering if there is a way to log ListMail acitivities to a file. I am using the Email Notification feature to "log" subscribes, unsubscribes and bounces by sending email. I would prefer having this saved to a simple (text) log file intead.

Also, when sending a newsletter to many subscribers, is there way of monitoring the sending progress? Once again, a log of some sort would be helpful.

If the solution is right in front of my eye, please help me see it ;-)

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