"Guru" questions on MvSMTP

[Kent Multer]

Hi folks,

One of my clients wants certain customers be automatically notified by email any time they raise the price of certain products, In some cases, there could be dozens of customers to notify, and maybe hundreds in the near future. I'm wondering if MvSMTP is the best way to do this.

I can write a module that will use vis_product to detect when the price of a product is increased, and immediately send a bunch of emails. But that could cause a significant time delay; I think an MvSMTP can take a second or so to execute. I've thought of a few solutions for this:

1. Instead of using a separate MvSMTP for each customer, send a single email to everyone; don't bother personalizing the message with "Dear [customer name]." But I don't actually know if one MvSMTP with lots of recipients is faster than lots of individual MvSMTPs; I suppose it depends on how the interaction works with the mail server.

2. Instead of sending the emails, have the module make entries in a DB table about the customers and product. Use a different module function, possibly triggered by a cron job once a day or so, which will read the table and send the emails.

3. Instead of using MvSMTP to send them, off-load some data to MailChimp, or some other 3rd-party email service, which will do the bulk sending. I've heard that it's better to use a 3rd party for bulk emails, to prevent the store from being blacklisted as a spammer. But in this case, the number of emails is fairly small; and this wouldn't happen very often. So I'm not sure if it's worth the extra effort to move the emailing out of the store.

Any thoughts from the gurus on these questions?

Thanks --

[Jonathan-Driftwood]

Hi Kent, long time no talk. Have you thought about a simple mailing list? A 'send one repeat many' kind of thing. Possibly the host offers some sort of mailing list features? Or maybe setup a small relay-only SMTP server? It may answer and return control to your script faster than a traditional SMTP server.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Option 3 would be preferable in my mind. Inevitably, email addresses go bad from people closing them, moving jobs, etc. If you're not doing auto bounce checking and address removal, then yes, you will ultimately get the site and/or server blacklisted by continuing to send to non-existent addresses. Option 2 would be much better than 1.

Mail Chimp is free for 2,000 subscribers and 12k emails per month, so not a bad option.

[Kent Multer]

Hi Jon -- my forum account has been broken since they installed the new version. After some testing, I found that it's actually all working except for the daily digests; if I post a question, I do get to see the responses. I also see an "Invalid server response" alert on my screen every couple of minutes while I'm typing into this box; anyone else seeing those?

David -- Thanks for the advice. I should explain that this issue came up for a store that uses my Reorder Manager module to process recurring purchases. Some customers complain when an item shows up one day with a higher price, so the merchant wants a convenient way to send out price-increase notices.

In this case, the volume of emails will be pretty low. Currently the most popular products have about 50 subscribers, and they don't increase prices very often. The email addresses will all be for customers who accepted a purchase in the last 30/60/90 days, so there aren't going to be many bounces. Does that change your recommendation? How much activity would it take for a store to run a risk of being blacklisted?

Thanks for your help --

[Jonathan-Driftwood]

In this case, the volume of emails will be pretty low. Currently the most popular products have about 50 subscribers, and they don't increase prices very often. The email addresses will all be for customers who accepted a purchase in the last 30/60/90 days, so there aren't going to be many bounces. Does that change your recommendation? How much activity would it take for a store to run a risk of being blacklisted?

Does the store normally send out email from its own IP - or through a relay server of some sort? Regardless, depending on the frequency you are probably just fine Kent.

[Kent Multer]

In the Domain Settings, the Mail Server is set to "localhost," so I guess the store is sending its own emails. The Reorder Manager sends maybe 10-20 emails on a typical day, just for normal customer notifications. So this new feature won't increase the volume, or the bounce rate, by much, although it will produce occasional bursts of a few dozen emails at a time..

But I have another client who's got about 5 times as many reorders going; their most popular product has over 1000 subscribers. What if they want this feature too? For future reference, I'd like to have some sense of what volume of traffic is OK, before we have to start off-loading that job to another server. Is there a rule of thumb, or maybe an actual server setting, for this?

Thanks --