Email Blast Problem

[ericE]

I am running into a problem using ACT! v6 sending out our nightly email newsletter to our clients.  I get the list of email addresses out of ACT and merge them with a template and hit send and sometimes it goes through but more then likely it will just hang.  The hard part is that I am unable to locate any errors or have any messages pop-up for me to look up. The only way to get out of this hang is to close out of ACT. I have let it sit for the weekend once and it still didn't move.  

The amount of email addresses to be sent out to at night doesn't vary, it is supposed to send out to around 500, but usually stops anywhere from 100-300 and just sits there.  The ones that it does get to do end up going out to the clients.

Has any one else run into this problem?

Any help would be appreciated 

[mrwright]

ericE,

It's possible that your ISP has an imposed SMTP limit.  In my case, Cox stops accepting e-mail, in bulk, somewhere after 100.  My fix for this was to creat multiple groups, in my case, alphabetically, and send around 85 to each.  It doesn't really take any longer, but it does eliminate the problem of wondering when it's going to fail.  You should be able to contact your ISP and ask them directly, or look on their webpage.  Hope this helps.

MrWright

[ericE]

Thanks for the heads up I will call them and let you know what they say

[vcli]

Our ISP uses a thing called Tarpit to freeze email accounts that try to send more than 20 emails in 1 minutes. It is used to automatically control spam.

[Roy_Laudenslager]

Your problem could be restrictions placed by the email ISP but they are more likely caused by Windows itself. When ACT! does an mail merge to email, it creates a separate message for each contact in the mail merge. It's more likely that you are maxing out temp file space or some other system resource with the number of emails being sent. For the volume and frequency of emails you are sending, I would suggest that you use a service such as Swift Page Email. Their charges are relatively modest and they can provide feedback directly to your ACT! database.

[GLComputing]

It's a well known issue (Outlook has it also)... usually between 100 and 150 emails in a merge.

Try the trial of MergeMaster! which we wrote for ACT! 5/6 specifically for this. Not only will it do as large a volume as you want, but it's faster and has many powerful functions to improve the mail merge.

[ericE]

I found out that the ISP isn't blocking the amount of emails going out, so Im back to an internal ACT problem.  I checked on the Exchange server and the outbound restrictions are set to 64000 emails at once so they are not getting near that cap.  Anyone know is there is a restriction in XP or what the system requirements would be to be able to send this out.  The system that this is running on is XP Pro SP3, with 1GB of ram, 3.0GHZ processor.

[ericE]

Thanks Roy, I would like to keep this as simple as possible and im not sure that adding another piece into the puzzle will help.  I would also like to keep this in house if possible.

[Roy_Laudenslager]

Please refer to my previous reply. From my experience in ACT! technical support, you are not going to get that volume of emails to send from ACT! in one mail merge. You will need to send smaller batches or use a third party addon.

[GLComputing]

I can tell you that the system will run out of resources (using Outlook or ACT! Internet Mail) at around 150 merged contacts while trying to encode the emails.

MergeMaster! does keep it in-house for you sending via your SMTP server ... it handles the volumes and is faster by doing the MIME encoding once at the begining and merging into the encoded emails and sending them as it goes.

Message Edited by GLComputing on 10-25-2008 04:02 AM