CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

New to CiviCRM and CiviMail...

Note: I have "Settings - Outbound Mail" using a third party smtp provider to overcome the hurdles of getting caught in Hotmail and Yahoo spam filters... did it all, SPF, Domainkeys etc but didn't have three years to spend on it so alternative smtp service was a godsend.

As I say, tests to a small list of 9 all went fine, many times (and nooo spam flagging

Have just sent my first mass mailing after many test that went very well.

But the live mailing of 214 emails has a huge number of bounces - 88% of 214 emails (see attached)

The next test I did had 4 of 4 bounce immediately.

The 'civicrm_mailing_event_queue' table has about 1500 records in it, should there be any at all 4 hours after the job has run or does that table hold records permanently?

Is there anyway to get the remaining 88% of the emails to send without too many hurdles?

Many TIA.

I cant seem to find the processed folder, is that because imap creates it and I am using pop?

Thanks.

I am asking smtp provider about this as we speak.

I suspect using external smtp bypasses any logging? I made my Exim logging verbose but nothing shows in there from the mailings, and if it isnt handling the outgoing mail nor should it I figure.

Is there anywhere CiviMail keeps logs or some way I can glean some info from anywhere within CiviMail / or my system?

I think this happened once in the early stages of the testing and when I altered the smtp settings in an attemt to get it going it sent all the previous tests like they were queued somewhere... the spool table is empty...

Oh and the bounce type is a plain 'Unknown' - no other details.

Thanks xurizaemon, their interface shows none of the bounces, it is very odd.
Like they are not reaching the smtp server at all.

If I do a small test say 10 recipients it goes through like a dream and no spam flagging.

When I run the real one it bounces all with type "Unknown" and no other info.

I can telnet to the smtp provider from the server (logged in with ssh)

I resorted to Gmail to send out the mailing as I was getting desparate and the list was small for this mailout (Gmail limit is 500 per 24 hrs) but I am not going to be so lucky in future...
Gmail went out fine...

Is there a recommended SMTP provider that anyone has had good experience with? I am using interspire.smtp.com.

Thanks lobo.

In looking a bit more I stumbled across this, it may not be relevant, does 2.2.2 require SOAP?

If I go to this URL

http://www.byronyoga.com/drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/soap.php

I get this

Fatal error: Class 'SoapServer' not found in /home/byronyog/public_html/drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/soap.php on line 39

Should I be concerned, is it related?

Bounces, click throughs, unsubs all record well for the mailings that have gotten through.

To do that, you need to investigate setting Exim up to smarthost your mail, but I believe that still won't tell you why Yahoo! are bouncing the email if you smarthost, b/c your Exim won't be talking to Yahoo!; Interspire's SMTP server will.

Viewing the bounced emails should show you the errors from Yahoo! - you could switch to IMAP, or just use Interspire's webmail to view the mailbox BEFORE CiviCRM clears it. (I didn't think to suggest that earlier.)

Re smarthost: Exim configuration varies based on OS (it can use a single large config file, or a complex structure of directories with many small files which get built at restart time into a single config file). For that reason I won't attempt to explain the process you need in detail. Searching for "Exim authenticated smarthost" should point you in the right direction, but as above, I don't think it's going to give you the details you need.

Ok, I have got Exim delivering all mail to my smtp smarthost. This gives me some logging of transactions between the messages CiviMail sends and what my smtp host says. Before I was totally blind but this should give me a better idea of what is going on.
If I could cut some PHP I'm sure I could get some logging going that way but this was easier for me with my skill set.

Tricky though because as I said before, initially all the small tests I did went through the smarthost fine, it was the real mailing that spat all the bounces, took a lot of mucking about to work out who got emails and who didnt and then making a new smart list of those who missed out first time. And yes I tried the "exclude members of this group", that resulted in 0 emails for the mailing.
For those who are interested I pulled the delivered and bounced messages into Access and did a query on who was missing from the delivered table...

Onwards.