Support

May 21, 2013 at 10:39 am

Mandrill does limit the number of emails you can send per hour, but they increase that limit very quickly if you have a good sending reputation.

May 21, 2013 at 12:40 pm

Hi there,

Event Espresso sends all email through the standard WordPress wp_mail function:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_mail

So if you can create a cron job to limit what gets sent via wp_mail, that should do the trick.

May 21, 2013 at 9:43 pm

I can tell you that cron jobs are not high on the list of things people want us to add to Event Espresso. Most businesses who are serious about their email systems turn to a third-party mail service. We even use a third-party email service for a lot of our emails and we send less than 400 emails per hour. Third-party services can offer better reputation management, tracking and better delivery which will more than make up for the cost of a new service.

We’ve had companies like Social Media Week, who process thousands of registrations at a time use Event Espresso. Event Espresso can work for big business.

Is there something we can do to facilitate this process, other than what information Josh has offered?

May 22, 2013 at 10:19 am

Hi Aivars,

Garth has pointed me to this thread.  You can find information about the WordPress wp_mail() function here -> http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_mail

There are some hooks in the wp_mail() function that you can investigate to see if they will serve your needs (view wp-includes/pluggable.php for the wp_mail() function).

From this thread it appears you mention something about a “responder plugin” you have.  Is this something you created or something another developer put together?  If you created it, depending on how you created it you could hook into the wp_mail() plugin and capture the outgoing Event Espresso emails and limit the sends per time period using your plugin?  If this isn’t your plugin then you may want to talk to that plugin developer and see if there’s a solution they could offer you.

By far the EASIEST way to achieve not going over your email send limits imposed by HostGator is to use the Email Transaction plugin we created to hook into either the Mandrill  or Postmark Transactional Email services.  As Garth has already mentioned, we switched to using that for all our own  business needs b/c of the benefits it brings in improving email deliverability (even though we run a dedicated host that has no restrictions on how many emails go out in a certain time period).

While it is possible that we *could* implement some options for sending emails (as you’ve suggested), it is not something we’ve chosen to invest our time in because there are already cost effective solutions out there (including the Email Transactions plugin we wrote).  We’ve simply chosen to prioritize development on the primary features of our product events and not implementing numerous features for email controls.  I agree notifications are VERY important to our product and that’s why we’ve gone with the proven method of using the built-in WordPress mail delivery system as it has been optimized for the greatest number of different possible server setups that use WordPress.  Even then, that fails (it didn’t work really efficiently for our own website!) which is why we also provide a solution we built for ourselves (for free!) to our customers to utilize as well in meeting their email needs.