How many emails can a web host send out?

[hstraf]

Uh... Sorry in advance, but I wasn't sure what forum to post this question into. Probably should've been the Hosting forum? Please have mercy.

I have a giant textfile on a website that I use to store names and emails of people who join my mailing list. It's very simple, and has only two fields consisting of email and name.

When it comes time to release a newsletter, I've always used a little Perl program I wrote to extract the information and feed it into sendmail on the web server...

This is my question. What happens when the list gets over a certain size, and the web server/host no longer wants to send out all those emails for me? (Ie: I'm using up too much time/resources on the server to do the mailings.) If I had... say 10,000 people in my list, that's a lot of emails.. not to mention the ones that come back as invalid addresses or whatever.

How do people deal with sending thousands of emails out for lists? Do you have to host your own lists, or rent a server? Or is there no limit to the web hosts "kindness?" and I can send as many as I want?

Thanks for any help.

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www.gimmeabuck.com <-- Have you given me a buck yet!?

[qslack]

Why don't you go ahead and ask them. They're the only ones who know.

If I recall, Hypermart allows 100 e-mails per day per site. My old host allowed more than 100000.

You may want to look into Lyris.

[eradtke]

There is no standard limit, each web host is different. A long while back when our newsletter was just starting out, our host at the time Hypermart sent us an email notifying us that our account had been placed on probation because we had sent our opt-in newsletter to 150 people. Our account sat there frozen for 3 or 4 days, during which we were banned from any means of accessing or updating the site: FTP, Web control panel, etc., and all our CGI scripts were disabled. At the end of their "investigation" into the matter, they placed us on their "safe" list which prevented their robot from flagging our account each time we sent out the newsletter. Needless to say, this situation as well as numerous downtimes and slow servers convinced us that it was time to ditch Hypermart.

Anyway, the point I am trying to get at is that it is best to take matters into your own hands and ask your host beforehand what their newsletter/email limit is. It's not something that has a fixed number throughout hosts.

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Eric Radtke
Web Tools: Web Site Resource
Who says all the good domains are taken? DomainMailings.com

[richjb]

Another thing:

There are two methods for sending email: 1) automatic, 2) put in mail query.

When sending large ammounts of email, the first one will bog down the server, and most likely make your host made. This is because is tries to send the email once the call to do so is made. On the other hand, the second one simply adds the email to a query, where the email will be sent when the mail server "has the time." The second choice may take longer to send out to the whole list, but it should be less harmful on the host.

Richard

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richard@brevig.com