Support #3978
closedNewsletter plug-in
Added by Gina Cherry about 9 years ago. Updated over 6 years ago.
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Description
We are interested in using the newsletter plug-in for a somewhat large email list (approximately 3 emails per week to 1000 - 2000 subscribers). Do you see any issue with this?
Updated by Boone Gorges about 9 years ago
By "the newsletter plug-in", do you mean MailPoet?
I'm not sure what'll happen if you try to send to this many users. It depends, in part, on how the particular plugin works; the bottleneck may be server resources, or it may be the mail system (like, us getting blacklisted for looking like spam). Ray, do you have any thoughts? I know the most surefire method is to use an external service, but I'm wondering whether you have any ideas about predicting in advance whether this is going to be a problem.
Updated by Gina Cherry about 9 years ago
I don't think I mean MailPoet. There is an installed plug-in called Newsletters: http://tribulant.com/docs/wordpress-mailing-list-plugin/37. I could also consider using MailPoet if that is a better option.
Updated by Raymond Hoh about 9 years ago
The Tribulant Newsletters plugin (wp-mailinglist) does have some form of email queue that utilizes WP cron for scheduled tasks:
http://tribulant.com/docs/wordpress-mailing-list-plugin/568
http://tribulant.com/docs/wordpress-mailing-list-plugin/1630
They recommend keeping the queue interval below 100 emails per blast (default is 50) at an interval of either 2 or 5 minutes. For a subscriber list of 2000 at 50 emails per blast every 5 minutes, this would take 3hr 20 mins to send a newsletter. If you up the count to 100 emails per blast, this would take 1hr 40 mins.
It would definitely be better to use an external service like Mailchimp for newsletters:
http://mailchimp.com/pricing/entrepreneur/
If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers, you can send up to 12,000 emails per month absolutely free.
Updated by Boone Gorges about 9 years ago
- Target version set to Not tracked
Thanks for your thoughts, Ray.
Gina, thanks for the clarification. Given that the Tribulant Newsletters plugin has the "interval" tool, there shouldn't be any problem with sending to a large list, as long as you don't mind it taking a few hours for your newsletters to go out to everyone. In Dashboard > Newsletters > Configuration, under "Email Scheduling", I'd recommend setting "Emails per Interval" to 50, and "Scheduling Interval" to "Every 2 Minutes". Give that a try, and let us know if you have any problems.
Ray - I agree that the third-party solutions are better in terms of reliability, but I'm not sure that we have the budget to support individual newsletters in the way that might be required if the 2000 subscriber/12000 email free Mailchimp limit were exceeded. It seems to me that a better long-term solution is to look into an external email service for all Commons emails - something like Mandrill - so that newsletters like this would just automatically work.
Updated by Gina Cherry about 9 years ago
Thanks Ray and Boone. Our email list is currently on CUNY's listserv, which is cumbersome to use and lacks some of the features we would like. We had considered MailChimp, but would almost certainly exceed the limit for free accounts at least some of the time. We will give Newsletters a try with the settings you recommend, but probably not until the fall since our programming for this semester is winding down.
Do you know if anyone else on the Commons has used this plug-in? I'd love to find out about any known limitations before investing a lot of time in it.
Updated by Boone Gorges over 6 years ago
- Status changed from New to Abandoned
Hi Gina - Very sorry that we lost the thread of this conversation.
I'm not very familiar with how MailChimp works. I assume they provide very rich tools for subscriber management and analytics about sending, etc. I also assume that they handle email sending on their servers, so performance should not be an issue. I'm pretty sure that they charge for these services, though, so it's perhaps primarily a question of whether you'd like to pay for the service.
I'm going to close this ticket because it's so old, but if you have further questions, or there's something that our team could do to improve your workflow, please don't hesitate to let us know.