Weird, inconsistent issues with QEmailServer
Wed, 03/10/2010 - 05:39
Folks,
I have a QCubed 1.0-based site; as a part of the site, I have a daemon that's sending out several thousand emails a day (no i'm not a spammer, everything is opt-in :)). Emails are sent through QEmailServer.
Those emails are simple HTML-based emails; they really have just simple links inside.
My issue is that these links sometimes (not consistently!) get scrambled during transition. Tags somehow get mixed up, and some links are non-functional in the email. The issue happens on a small percentage of all sent emails; it is not consistent (i.e. the same exact source message HTML may or may not cause the scrambling in transition).
Have any of you seen this? Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot?
Are you sending all 1000 emails as a batch. If so you may try a staggered approach i.e. send 250 every 15 minutes.
We've sent hundreds of personalized e-mails at a time without any reported issues. I wonder if you're encountering some sort of memory corruption on your server.
We have written a few mass mailer programs for clients. We found we get the best results on larger mailing list when we throttle the output. Helps take the load off the server and evens out the bandwidth.
also, watch out for spam - if you happen to be sending thousands of emails, be sure to throttle the process so your server doesn't get marked as spammer.
my hosting provider only allows me to send 100 emails per hour per domain name.
Thanks, folks. I'm already throttling - a maximum of 30 emails is getting sent every minute.
I seriously doubt memory corruption on my box is the issue; EVERYTHING else is working just fine (no random issues, etc). The problem is localized to emails.
StackOverlfow folks are suggesting switching over to base64 for the contents of the actual email (not the attachment) - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2414785/emails-sometimes-get-scrambled. What do you folks think about that idea?
QEmailServer currently uses 7bit; there's a bug to switch it over to quoted-printable (http://trac.qcu.be/projects/qcubed/ticket/439).