phpList: seriously, wtf?

February 11, 2008 7:27 PM

phpList: seriously, wtf?

I develop a website for a non-profit, and they requested I set up phpList on the server so they can send out newsletters.

Everything went ok (eventually), I can now send emails and recipients will get them. Eventually.

I sent a bunch of emails as tests on Sat., copying them to both my gmail and yahoo accounts. phpList's queue shows that it sends them within a second.

However, I don't receive them to my email accounts until, at a minimum, a few hours later. Some of them were still showing up this morning, 2 days later!

I am a pro. web developer, but don't know that much about email servers and such. Have other people had this experience with phpList? Do yahoo and gmail give delivering these emails a low priority or what? And where exactly are they for the two days between phpList "sending" them and them showing up in my inbox?

I am a bit worried that my client might want to send newsletters with time-sensitive info. A few hours is ok, but two days is ridiculous.

Any ideas or alternatives?
thanks!

posted by drjimmy11 to computers & internet (13 comments total)

(the site is hosted by Dreamhost, if it matters)
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:29 PM on February 11, 2008

Examine the full header info, look at the timestamps in the Received: lines, and see where the holdup is?
posted by Pinback at 7:41 PM on February 11, 2008

It seems more likely to me that a delay would be caused by a relaying mail server rather than by the phpList software. How many emails were you sending at once?

Does simply composing and sending a single email with PHP code result in the same delay?

Whatever the cause of the delay is I would note that in this kind of application problems frequently don't show up until you scale it up. When you've settled on a solution I would test sending several times whatever you think the maximum number of email you'd expect your client to send at once.
posted by XMLicious at 7:45 PM on February 11, 2008

here is a sample header from my yahoo account. looks like it was held up on Dreamhost's servers for 2 days? Can anyone shed any light on what was maybe happening there (why did it go to 3 seperate dreamhost servers?) pls. excuse my ignorance of these matters, I am usually more of a frontend developer.


From Webmaster Sat Feb 9 18:27:59 2008
Return-Path:
Authentication-Results: mta193.mail.mud.yahoo.com from=valentinoachakdeng.org; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 66.33.216.244 (EHLO pants.dreamhost.com) (66.33.216.244)
by mta193.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:42:54 -0800
Received: from smarty.dreamhost.com (smarty.dreamhost.com [208.113.175.8])
by pants.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E783A14C567
for ; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:42:51 -0800 (PST)
Received: from chronos.dreamhost.com (chronos.dreamhost.com [208.113.189.11])
by smarty.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id BBF6D17C8D1
for ; Sat, 9 Feb 2008 18:47:17 -0800 (PST)
Received: by chronos.dreamhost.com (Postfix, from userid 2155805)
id 859DE49557; Sat, 9 Feb 2008 18:27:59 -0800 (PST)
To: [e-mail]
Subject: hey
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008 18:27:59 -0800
From: Webmaster
Message-ID:
Precedence: bulk
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
type="text/html";
boundary="b1_dda8bbb456696e4bb26660212562326e"
Content-Length: 6887
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:51 PM on February 11, 2008

How many emails were you sending at once?

I was sending, at most, two emails at once, since this was just for testing purposes.
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:51 PM on February 11, 2008

could Precedence: bulk in the header be a clue? is dreamhost giving these emails extremely low priority? if so, is this normal for hosting companies to do, or should this be considered unreasonably crappy?
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:53 PM on February 11, 2008

Received: from smarty.dreamhost.com (smarty.dreamhost.com [208.113.175.8]) by pants.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E783A14C567
for ; Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:42:51 -0800 (PST)
Received: from chronos.dreamhost.com (chronos.dreamhost.com [208.113.189.11]) by smarty.dreamhost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id BBF6D17C8D1
for ; Sat, 9 Feb 2008 18:47:17 -0800 (PST)

Here's your bad hop: smarty.dreamhost held on to it for a couple days for some reason.
posted by rhizome at 7:57 PM on February 11, 2008

see this dreamhost is having mail troubles at the moment
posted by DJWeezy at 7:58 PM on February 11, 2008

ahhh! thank you DjWeezy! maybe I should bookmark that "status" page?
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:01 PM on February 11, 2008

Also, Yahoo appears to graylist email. This is problematic when you are running a new e-commerce site. We raised high hell and the issue went away, but they never formally admitted to doing this. Didn't have an issue with Gmail, though.
posted by sachinag at 8:46 PM on February 11, 2008

Take a look at phpList's config.php at the queuing and batching settings. It may be attempting to send the 1 or 2 emails spread out over X minutes. It helps to do that with large lists in order to prevent flooding mail servers, but maybe it also does it for smaller lists too. eg: "Spread out the sending of emails over 1 hour." If you only have 2 subscribers, it will may send one out every 30 minutes.
posted by afx114 at 10:37 PM on February 11, 2008

Just to warn you, if you send newsletters out from your web server (particularly from cheap shared hosting), then expect a large percentage of the emails to fail to get through or sit in spam folders. Services such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor/MailBuild cost money, but they take care of a lot of the details that make reliable delivery tricky nowadays and are often worthwhile when you do the sums.
posted by malevolent at 12:03 AM on February 12, 2008

Seconding malevolent. I send out an email newsletter for work to about 10,000 people and I'm very happy to spend around $100 and know that I don't have to deal with that kind of timing stuff, just making sure that the content & design are rocking. (so to speak.)

And I'm a total cheap bastard, too; I'm not likely to spend money when I don't have to.

I love Campaign Monitor BTW. Easy to use, inexpensive, etc., etc.
posted by epersonae at 8:33 AM on February 12, 2008