mail limits: how to work with it?

Hi, I'd like to know how to work with the email limit. My problem is that I'd like to know (maybe programmatically) the limits so I can postpone some email I have to send.
I need to know it, otherwise if my site have a peak subscription of 100 people, I can't send the subscription's emails.



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From the wiki article (which you really should consider going over before asking questions here): http://wiki.dreamhost.com/116_Common_Questions

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49. Do you allow mailing lists to be sent out from your servers? What is the email per hour limit?

You should use our mailing list software for any mailing lists you want to run with us. Websites that send email are limited to 100/hr via SMTP and 200/hr via SSH/SHELL. All mailings must be compliant with our anti-spam policy.

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I read it but they don't speak about other kind of mailing.
If I have a forum, for example, what happens if more than 100 people register in one hour?
If you saw something on the wiki, please let me know.

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It applies to *all* mailing that goes out from the DH mail servers. There are no exceptions (that I'm aware of).

If more than 100 people register in one hour, the ones over the 100 user mark will not receive a confirmation email (assuming that's how you have it setup).

I'm not sure what other kind of information you're looking for otherwise... like a mailing list? I'm pretty sure the same limit applies to those though.

Well, that is the part wich is not clear (and not fair maybe).
Will them NOT receive an email or they have to wait an hour?
I think there should be a way to know this.

There should be some other information, otherwise how can forum be hosted on dreamhost?

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By using a different mail server other than DreamHost's?
I mean, if you feel you're going to need more than 100 emails per hour, that's the way I would go personally. You could probably even use Gmail, from what I've understood, for that purpose.

Right, they won't receive the E-mail if more than 100 new registrants come in one hour. DH effectively bounces the mail back to you. I don't know if there's features or plugins to queue the e-mail to only send 100 per hour, but that would work.

The other concern i'd have is that if you're getting more than 100 new members an hour, I'm not sure that you can keep your CPU usage low enough for a shared server. You'd have to do a lot of work to optimize your forum to make that happen.



--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

I've never been able to set any CMS to use Gmail SSL SMTP server.
I'm not saying that it is not possible, just that I never made it work.

You can deal with the limitation by setting up a queuing system with PHP.
Here's the code you will need: http://www.javascript.ro/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/email-queue.zip

Can you give some advice on how to install this? The site linked to seems to be in some other language, (Romanian), and I can't quite figure it out.

1. Import the "database.sql" into your MySQL database.
2. Include the "qmail.php" file.
3. Initialize the class like this: $qmail = new queuedMail(200, "1 HOUR");
4. Replace everywhere in your code "mail([...]" with "$qmail->mail([...]"

... and that's it.

Thanks, vlad! That helps a lot! One suggestion that might be helpful, though:

If you have any other applications that might be sending mail as the same user that *are not* using the "queue" code (another domain, etc.), you might want to make the limit something less than the 200 mails in the example (since that "200" represents your entire hourly quota), to allow for the *other* mail to be processed in addition to the queued mail and still remain under quota.

--rlparker

Recent advice from Jeff, Mr. Abuse @ DreamHost:

http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=forum_troubleshooting&Number=80858

Excerpt:

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Most people never bump up against those limits, and those who do can contact us, explain their situation/needs, and then potentially have their limit increased. If they are using bulk email in any way we will likely need to independently verify that they are fully compliant with our anti-spam policies before doing so.

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I've never seen it bounce back, it just gets deleted and you don't know you've hit the limit. Annoying when you have a forum and a few other things on your site, then you send a newsletter and half the people didn't get it.