One of my clients wants to setup newsletter mailing list. He has about 6000 emails in his mailing list. I know that LP has (as all hosts do) limitation on how many emails can be send. I just searched the forum and latest posts I found is from around a year ago saying that the limit is 600/hour but no more than 20/minute. Is this still correct, or they have been changed?

Adittional question: I am planning to queue all the emails into DB and let cron proccess the emails. This will also work well with any other automatic (non-newsletter) mailings. However, I never worked with cron. Does anyone knows how to set cron to execute php script?

Thank you

Hi Alex, yes that would still be the e-mail sending limit.  500-600 per hour and 20 per minute.

Don't follow those instructions too literally. "* * * * *" for the time/date specification in cron will run your script every minute! You also will need to check in cPanel for just where PHP lives (I don't think you need the #! line at LP anyway). Just use php -q full_path_to_script_name for the command. To silence routine email (messages sent to stdout), append >/dev/null to the end of the command. Add 2>&1 to also silence stderr output, but it's generally not a good idea to bit-bucket error messages.

The last I heard, the limits were 600 per hour and a peak rate of 20 per minute. From what I've heard (I can't speak officially for LP), they're pretty strict about cutting you off once you exceed the limit. The consequences supposedly can range from lost emails to account suspension. You can't send out a burst of emails over the limit and then promise to behave yourself until your average falls under the limit. You're simply going to have to find a way to throttle your sending to keep within the limits. PHPlist is supposed to do a good job at that, and if your sending out the same email to everyone, it would probably be a good choice. By the way, I've heard rumor that the email limit includes outbound and inbound together, so you may want to be a bit conservative in your settings.

To send 1550 newsletters out, you'd have to take about 2.5+ hours at 10 dumped into the hopper every minute.