I work with a whole lot of different clients in making sure their mass mailings are going out successfully. One of the pressing issues they’re always worried about is: did my message actually get sent out?<\/p>\n

Although we can’t ultimately control where a message will be delivered when it finds itself into a mail client,\u00a0 we can do our best to make sure that things are working as best as possible on our<\/em> end. I’m going to talk about ways to verify that sending is working out correctly, using the Tracker plugin that comes with Dada Mail.<\/p>\n

Sending Errors<\/h2>\n

Sending errors on your side can happen for a couple of reasons. One reason is that the authentication of your mail server\/service has changed, and what has been saved in your mailing list settings is now incorrect.<\/p>\n

Enter the Tracker plugin<\/strong>: among many other jobs, it does keep track of sending errors. I’ll demonstrate this with a test mailing list with a just few subscribers. I’ll set up my sending options to use an SMTP server that I know doesn’t exist: I’ve set my SMTP server to, inconceivable!<\/strong> which… isn’t even a valid name for an SMTP server!<\/p>\n

This will all but guarantee I’ll get sending errors on my end:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To confirm we’ve totally botched up our sending options, we can try them out by clicking the button labeled, Save, Then Test<\/strong>, which will open up a modal window showing the results of testing our sending options:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As expected, Dada Mail is having problems connecting to this non-existent SMTP server. So, it should be no surprise that when we send a mass mailing, we’ll also have problems.<\/p>\n

So, let’s do just that!<\/p>\n

I’m going to send a mass mailing out to a subscription list with just three addresses, and see what the Tracker plugin tells me.<\/p>\n

While I wait for my mass mailing to finishing, one strange thing that may be tip me off that there’s a problem is how slow my\u00a0 mass mailing seems to be taking. Hmm! I wonder what could be going on? If I check my error logs using the Log Viewer plugin<\/strong>, I see lines in the log that look similar to this,<\/p>\n

[Mon Jan 30 21:27:09 2017] mail.cgi: [j] Mass Mailing:20170130211832.79094872_at_dadamailproject.com Cannot send to, address: dadamailest+1@gmail.com after 2 x 3 tries, skipping and logging address. at DADA\/Mail\/Send.pm line 1951.<\/code><\/p>\n

Even if Dada Mail has trouble sending out to an address, it does try re-sending the same message out a few times, just in case the first attempt and error was a fluke. If it’s not successful, it’ll wait a brief period of time before trying again.<\/p>\n

This slowdown is not by accident: many mass mailing sending problems are because the mass mailing options are set to send out messages at too fast of a rate, which leads you to go over your hourly email quota set up for your account. Check your host\/email service to see if you fall under such a restriction. Most shared hosts have some sort of hourly email restriction.<\/p>\n

Once my mass mailing completed, I checked the Tracker plugin, and found this:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yup: a 100% failure rate<\/strong> of sending out to my mailing list. D’oh!<\/p>\n

This type of evidence:<\/p>\n

the test in the sending options failing<\/p>\n

the mass mailing taking longer than I would have anticipated<\/p>\n

the specific error logs about sending problems<\/p>\n

the Tracker plugin reporting a 100% sending error rate<\/p>\n

Makes me believe that there’s a problem on MY side! In this case, it’s my SMTP server set up incorrectly, and not something else, like my email server being black listed, or my messages going to a junk folder. This is a problem I can easily fix on my side (use the right SMTP credentials!) and not something I’ll need to investigate further, until I fixed this problem<\/p>\n

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