CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

There is nothing like real data to raise new questions.  We did dozens of tests with a few select people and a couple of runs with small sub sets of the data.  Yesterday, we ran a full mailing.  We have about 2,100 contacts, with 1,300 having email addresses.

I was excited because we did get 13 "bounces" which I thought was odd because we don't have the Soap / IMAP installed.  Turned out that there is a problem because we have some quotes at the end of the last name which occurred someplace in our conversion.   Since the "bounces" created email on hold, I just created a group of them, we'll fix the names and re-send the 13.

The real failures to deliver were about 85 so far and came back to me.  I'm not sure why the failures came back to my email address because another person, our organization's administrator ran the cycle.  Is it because the cron job has my logon and password?  Seems like we set the reply address someplace, maybe I'm still in there - can't remember where that was.  We'll handle manually (maybe) and look into the Soap / IMap

We ran 20 emails every 10 minutes, so by this morning after about 11 hours, the cycle was finished.  Fantastic!

Our organization's administrator seems to have really caught on to sending civimails and she seems to have an easier time copying html from her Mac without the Microsoft "stuff" than I do from my PC.

Open tracking (subject to email client security of displaying images) seem to be working and are very interesting and has the unexpected benefit of letting us know when people are on their PCs.

Click through tracking seems to be working.

I am somewhat concerned about database size as we collect all this information for mailings that become out of date.  Do others have a trim process for activity?

Click throughs on links seem to be working fine, but interesting there are not as many as we thought there would be - only 31 so far.  But a very useful feature.

This is where we are - now trying to tune our process.

Comments or Suggestions?

I really appreciate all of the help that I have received in the forums and feel that the least I can do is give reports back that may help others that are going through the same process.  Also, posting what we have done provides an opportunity for others to let us know where we can improve.

Like many on this forum, the access to health care movement does not have a lot of money, but we do have thousands of people, even just in Colorado.  CiviCRM is already helping us be more effective.

How can organizations that are benefiting from CiviCRM help?
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,1579.0.html

Thank you and all of the CiviCRM Team for your help.

I don't remember if this is the reason in Denver Dave's case, but some ISP's will limit the amount of email that you can send per hour. It's to keep out SPAMers

With a lot of help from my friends, including Denver Dave, we got our first large email out today. So far, 9,000 of approximately 21,000 mails have gone out. Earlier in the day I sent another "blast" of about 3,000. This was a success, as far as I am concerned.

There are quite a few bounces but I expect 10% is not that bad considering this mail is going to a large group of American ex-pats living overseas.

I will report more on our results later but, in general, CiviMail is working pretty good!

One question I do have:

There is a column in the click-through summary that says "Success Rate". For every line it is set to 0.00%. What is it supposed to mean?

I'd also like to see a way of gathering more statistics as an extension of the reporting. Our management is going to ask questions that I cannot answer without doing some DB queries. Any help will be appreciated and any stuff I do will be contributed.

Update: the "blast" finished and took approximately 6.5 hours for all 21,000 or so emails

BIRT looks interesting. I wan't aware of it.

I'm still wondering what "Success Rate" means.