attachments to bulk e-mails

[bjwhitson]

Is there a size limit on the attachments for bulk e-mails? When I sent out an e-mail thru Personal profiles last week, I had 3 PDF files attached. The largest one was about 250 KB. It took almost 2 1/2 hours to send to 132 addresses. We do this every week and have problems each time. Any suggestions?
Betsy

[NeilZ]

Is there a size limit on the attachments for bulk e-mails? When I sent out an e-mail thru Personal profiles last week, I had 3 PDF files attached. The largest one was about 250 KB. It took almost 2 1/2 hours to send to 132 addresses. We do this every week and have problems each time. Any suggestions?
Betsy

You have to realize, the system is sending an individual email to each address, not a CC to 132 people in one email. It doesn't matter how large one attachment is, its the total of all the attachments. Say you have three with sizes of 250, 125, 175. You're looking at close to .5 MB per email.

It may not be an issue with Powerchurch either, it could be that your ISP, has a limitation. What I would do is break up the transmission by setting the advanced email setting to send 25 every 5 minutes. See what happens.

[Zorak]

The factors will be your internet speed, how quickly your e-mail server responds to each request, and how large the e-mail is multiplied by the number of e-mails you are sending.

Another factor that has been making more and more of a stink lately is antivirus & especially "security suites" that insert themselves into the loop of outgoing e-mail. In that last scenario, you then add an extra layer of virus scanning of the e-mail content and each attachment *FOR EACH E-MAIL* that is sent.

[NeilZ]

Good point .. you may want to check if your anti-virus is set to always scan outgoing correspondence.

[bjwhitson]

Thanks for the suggestions. The software was already set up to process no more than 50 messages every 10 minutes, based on connection issue I was having 3-4 months ago. That didn't seem to affect the problem. The anti-virus software and the ISP restrictions are 2 things I will have to look into.

When I sent out the same email, with one attachment, on 2 different computers at work, one went thru with about 30 addresses failing to connect to the server and the other computer stopped after 37% went thru and got the error message that "A connection to the email server could not be made. The SMTP server reported as error 74;232.17.60 has too many connection (2) on frfwmhc04." We get this one quite frequently.

I'll get my IT person to check the ISP settings and we'll go from there. Did I say that I'm using Version 11.1 but have already ordered the 11.5 upgrade? don't know if this will even affect the problem, but we needed to upgrade anyway.
Thanks,
Betsy