Email Limitations on sending bulk mail

What is a bulk mail?

If you send out emails to more than say 10 people at a time, with the message “undisclosed recipients” then you are sending out bulk email. I had one instance where a group was sending out a marketing message to around 80 recipients. They received a lot of messages back that the mail was not sent. In fact it went out to the 50 people, the last 30 did not receive it.

50 Limit and 250/hr

Within the hosting we use there are two limits you need to be aware of. The first is the 50 limit. Any email you send should not carry more than 50 email addresses on it. If it does have more than 50 addresses the mail will be sent to just the first 50 and then you will get back error messages.

So break up any mailing lists into say groups of 40 email addresses which should work ok and send more than one mail. Continue reading Email Limitations on sending bulk mail

TalkTalk Mail problems

(22nd November 2015)

There have been several instances of issues sending mail into the following domain names which I think all fall under the Talk Talk group of companies. I have seen another mail rejected message this morning to a talktalk.net recipient.

tiscali.co.uk
aol.com
talktalk.net

Each time I see these problems or someone reports a mail rejected message I get in contact with the sending hosting company and ask them to check. They report back that the issue lies with Talk Talk.

There seems to be some evidence that this group of domains have tightened up their security with regards to email. It has progressively got more and more complicated this year, most likely because of the high volumes of emails being sent by spammers. Various checks are being carried out to ensure that the server associated with a domain is really where the mail came from, and not from a 3rd party. Continue reading TalkTalk Mail problems

Issues sending mail to Talk Talk customers

(3rd November 2015).

I have received messages from two clients over the past two days relating to “bounce back” messages being returned from the TalkTalk network.

The messages will carry this text:

Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

someone@talktalk.net Continue reading Issues sending mail to Talk Talk customers

Managing SPAM

spam-management Many of you running charitable organisations will have a dedicated primary email address that you use for incoming, and sometimes outgoing email. Over time this email address becomes “known” to spammers and you start to receive unsolicited email on it.

While looking at the hosting for many organisations I can see huge email boxes that are full of this type of content. (I only see the size of the mailbox, not the mail). Following the issues I faced with my main email account in October, I decided to look into methods for reducing it, redirecting it, and eliminating it. Some of these are available to you through the hosting you use. I will explain the pro’s and con’s below, and how you can “non destructively” experiment to see how spam management may work for you. Continue reading Managing SPAM

Using MailPoet

The following is of interest if your site has a newsletter application built in called Mail Poet.

If you have an email address list containing more than 70 subscribers for your newsletter please do take care with the last step before you send out your newsletter. Generally speaking shared hosting providers do not like bulk mailing applications running in their hosting. They use a variety of methods to detect mail being sent from the hosting which includes monitoring the volume per second/ minute and the number of error messages received such as “recipient account does not exist”. Continue reading Using MailPoet

Protected: Managing Spam

I need editing help

I appreciate that while my intent is to help you all to manage your own editing, that is not always possible. Some people just don’t want to do any editing. Or it is too large a job to handle.

If you want me to update your sites on your behalf, I can do that to help you. There are a couple of sites where I provide this service.

It is fair to say I can probably make changes more quickly than you can. If you want me to make changes on your behalf; group a set of changes together along with all of the information that is needed. I will reply with an estimate on how long it will take to complete the work. For ad hoc changes my charges will be £20/ hr in increments of 15 minutes. So asking me to add a couple of events to your site and a supporting article would take me 15 minutes to add and test and a charge of £5. I will always advise how long it will take and seek your permission to proceed.

If there is something that you cannot change easily I will continue to handle these at no charge provided I do not too many requests from the same site.

If you need more than this level of help, then contact me and we can figure out how I can help.

Got a server? Then you may need one of these.

This might seem like a luxury, they have been around for a long time and also very expensive. Now however they are available to home users and small businesses for less than £100.

UPS

A UPS is an Uninterruptable Power Supply. It is used to maintain power to devices that need to run continuously. Things like servers, network attached storage (NAS), and to a lesser extent your router and some key network devices if you are backing up your server.

You can also use it to power your desktop PC, which should mean you never lose anything through a power failure.

They perform several important functions, one is power line conditioning, and the other is continuing to provide 240v AC to a device when the mains power to a property or office fails.

The way they do this is by charging a battery (or several batteries) in a box. The power from the batteries is passed to an inverter which regenerates the 240V AC at an output or several outputs.

If the incoming mains power is interrupted then the output of the device continues to run based on the available battery power. That is, until the battery is exhausted.

The more sophisticated ones can send signals to attached devices to ask them to shut down (gracefully). Continue reading Got a server? Then you may need one of these.

Understanding how to use this site

I have added a page under the main menu that shows you how to use this site. There are currently over 350 news/ self help/ information items on the site with hints and tips and 34 fixed pages. I realised that some of you visiting here may not be aware they are there because they cannot be located directly through the main menu.

They are news posts that are accessed through the news and alerts page. Each is categorised according to the content in the page and it’s relevance.

To help you get as much information as possible from the information on this site please see this page for more an explanation of how the site works. How to use this site.

For clients of Wingrove-Media

If you have recently been working with me, and I have developed a site for you, or I am hosting your site you can sign up to a monthly newsletter using the form below:

Please note that if you are not recognised as a client you will not be added to the mailing list. Most general articles on this site are freely available to everyone, I have made this available in the same spirit of many other developers who wish to help people, if only in thanks to those that have helped me in the past when I first started. The purpose of the content in this site is primarily targeted at my client base who have a specific implementation or are using specific services to support their website and email.

Please check the sidebar for a list of articles, or search the site for something using the methods described in the sidebar. There is a category cloud in the side bar which is used to categorise posts. You can use this to narrow down your search.

Photographs – another strategy!

Image file size and WordPress websites

I have commented in the past, and also cover it in my video tutorial on images that it is important to reduce the size of the image before you place it on your site. The reason why this is important is because it will take up space in your hosting, and cause your site to load more slowly. As a broad guide the image size for most cases should be around 100KB or less, 200KB for a large image. I frequently find images that are 4MB or larger. These have been uploaded to sites pretty much straight from the camera.

The preferred way…

I still advocate; do your image processing outside of WordPress. Shrink the image down to roughly the target size which for images in the content area will be around 600 pixels wide. For images in a gallery, then 1024pixels wide. Use compression to reduce the file size, then upload it.

If you have fat files on the site already…..

WordPress introduced some new facilities in image processing in May 2015. All sites have this built in.

To access it log into your site and look at the menu on the left and choose Media (Library) and check the last few things you uploaded. Make sure they are around 100KB or less unless they need to be larger.

If you find something that is straight off of a camera and over 400KB, then do the following. Editing images in WordPress

Look for Edit image button in the bottom left of the image.

Click on it. Look for the Scale Image option in the top right.

scaling images

Change this to something close to your target size. Remember that there is no value in having an image 4000 pixels wide if the screen space in the content area of your site is only 600 pixels. It is as simple as that.

Next change the X value (first dimension) the second one will follow to maintain the aspect ratio of the image.

Then click on Scale. A copy of your image will be created in WordPress to your settings. It is automatically saved* (*skip down to the bottom of these notes learn about some other things you can do at this stage).

Close the window using the small x in the top right of the window. At this stage, the original large image is still on the server. But the smaller image is now available to you for adding to pages. So half of the problem has been solved.

You can always restore it back again by going back to view the image in the image library and selecting edit. You will see a drop down which says “RESTORE IMAGE ORIGINAL SIZE”.

BUT…..

The settings built into WordPress are quite aggressive. It really depends on your images and what is in them whether this works for you or not. I generally find that any image manipulation on the server yields a smaller file (good) but the image is soft (less detailed … bad). So use with care. This is why I think it is best to do this work outside of WordPress before they are uploaded.

Other things you can do in WordPress

While in the image editor, you can also do the following within WordPress.

Rotate the image clockwise or anti-clockwise
Flip the image horizontally or vertically
Re-crop the image

50% of the problem solved!

It appears that these actions create another copy of the image. I am pretty sure that there is a course of action you can take which will remove the original. While experimenting and writing this article, I could not reproduce the key/ screen sequence. But I am sure I have done it in the past.

If you are trying to scale down a large file accidentally loaded on the site, then the last step is remove the original after you have created a copy. If I can reproduce those steps, I will come back and edit this. It is however worth resizing images as this will save bandwidth at the server and to the client. Remember mobile users pay per MByte.