Newsletter mailing timeout

[RFH Customer: E-levation]

Hi All,

Some time ago I developed an ASP newsletter application for a client, where their administrator can mail subscribers (yes there is an unsubscribe link and and they are all genuine subscribers). Anyway, when the list was small it all worked fine. Now that we have got to 500+ subscribers Im starting to get a time out message - most of the mails go out but the latest at the bottom of the list dont make it.

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'
Script timed out
/subscribers/broadcast.mail.asp
The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

Any ideas on how to overcome this issue?

Cheers,
John

[RFH Reseller: nick]

Hi All,

Some time ago I developed an ASP newsletter application for a client, where their administrator can mail subscribers (yes there is an unsubscribe link and and they are all genuine subscribers). Anyway, when the list was small it all worked fine. Now that we have got to 500+ subscribers Im starting to get a time out message - most of the mails go out but the latest at the bottom of the list dont make it.

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'
Script timed out
/subscribers/broadcast.mail.asp
The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

Any ideas on how to overcome this issue?

Cheers,
John

You could try making the script break the emailing up into smaller chunks, sending just a few hundred each time.

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

Try adding a script timeout at the top of the page by adding this line:

Server.ScriptTimeout = 100

100 = 100 Seconds so you'll probably want to increase this but that should hopefully stop it timing out. Remember though that a number of emails will have already been sent when the origional timeout happened so if it's resent some subscribers will recieve it twice.

[RFH Reseller: RMPnet]

Hi John,

Have you tried using the mail queue facility of aspemail, assuming that's what you're using?

AspEmail 5.0 offers the flag Mail.Queue which, if set to True, instructs the Send method to place a message in a queue and return immediately, without opening an SMTP session. Your message-sending ASP script no longer has to wait until a message is sent, which means a better client-response time and less load on IIS.

<% 
Set Mail = Server.CreateObject("Persits.MailSender") 
Mail.Host = "localhost" 
Mail.From = "TESTCODE@yourdomain.co.uk" 
Mail.Fromname = "FROM NAME HERE" 
Mail.AddAddress "TEST@yourdomain.co.uk" 
Mail.Subject = "SUBJECT TEXT HERE" 
Mail.Body = "BODY TEXT HERE" 

Mail.Queue = TRUE 
Mail.Send 
%>

Setting Queue = True is the only real difference the manual is here http://www.aspemail.com/manual_07.html

Regards
Keith.

[RFH Customer: cswd]

Queue Makes plenty more sense. I wish I'd known that existed sooner (rather than delving into MSMQ and writing a windows service to fart out the spam).

You don't want to EVER rely on scripttimeout as this can be (and should be!!) overridden on the web server configuration. Not only that, the browser may have a timeout which drops the http connection (which will mess up your script too).

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

The best way to do this is with chunks, where your script automatically makes an HTTP refresh:

http://www.mydomain.com/sendmail.asp?startfrom=1

redirects to

http://www.mydomain.com/sendmail.asp?startfrom=100

redirects to

http://www.mydomain.com/sendmail.asp?startfrom=200

etc...

By the way - I hope whatever you are emailing is legit.

[RFH Customer: E-levation]

Hi All,

Thanks for all your suggestions over the day. I think I will try the Mail.Queue = TRUE in the short term and test it out, then when I get a bit more time later in the week I will try breaking it up into chunks.

For the record my mailings are legit all right, they go out to conference delegates who will be attending conferences on important matters of the day such as Waste Water Management, letting them know who the latest speakers will be etc ("Ive been in waste water for 20 years and ill tell yiz all about it" sort of thing), about once or twice a month. Oh perhaps one day Ill get the latest MTV2, BMW or better still a new playboy site to work on....until then..its back to waste water....

[RFH Reseller: steveg]

Good luck. Have been trying it on the RF servers - never got it to work. Unforunately, it seems that the professional version of ASPEmail is not installed?

Might be cheaper to actually buy the Professional version of W3Jmail.

SG

[RFH Reseller: RMPnet]

I did test the script above before I posted it so as far as I'm concerned the queue feature works on Carbon.

Regards
Keith.

[RFH Reseller: petemasson]

I had this problem with a PHP mailing system a couple of years ago, and got round it using the same method Warren suggested with HTTP refreshes and querystrings. Never had a problem with it since (it regularly mails 1200 people)... until I just tried it with IE7 beta...