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   in a chat no one can hear you scream
Thursday, April 28 2011
It was another rainy day, complete with thunder and lightning and crappy DSL-borne internet. I don't know if it's the weather, the lack of a money-paying job, infuriating interactions with Godaddy.com, or some sort of midlife crisis, but I've been feeling kind of unfulfilled for a few days now. As for Gretchen, she's upped her daily Celexa dose and is unusually cheerful.
Regarding Godaddy.com and a client's site I'm am hosting with that particular company, today I finally just gave up on getting any satisfaction from Godaddy's technical support. I'd been wanting to be able to send multiple emails at a time using a for loop in PHP, but any time I sent more than one, the SMTP server would hang uselessly for minutes at a time. I'd never seen such craptastic behavior in any other LAMP application, but Godaddy kept contending that all was well. I'd been using an online chat to communicate with technical support, so you can see for yourself how unhelpful they were and how angry it made me (though I knew not to use obscenities because they always threaten to cut off communication when you curse):

Chat Transcript


You have been connected to

Nathan A. - Server Concierge.

Nathan A. - Server Concierge: Please note: All Live Chat sessions are logged and may be monitored for security and quality assurance purposes.
Thank you for contacting Live Chat support for Virtual and Dedicated Servers. This is Nathan. How can I help you?

[my identity as client]: could you please just run this simple script:
http://xxx.com/mailx.php?x=15
all it tries to do is send 15 emails to me. that's all it does. the emails are short. it hangs indefinitely. this is NOT acceptable. will you please fix this? that is really all i am asking.

Nathan A. - Server Concierge: Unfortunately, we are unable to assist with any coding or scripting issues. You can run any scripts that you would like on your server.

[my identity as client]: i made that script for you to showcase how dreadful your smtp server is

Nathan A. - Server Concierge: If the script attempts to send 15 messages all at once, you will likely experience an issue with the connections to the relay server.

[my identity as client]: it is not a scripting issue -- it mere showcases the laughable quality of your smt server

[my identity as client]: well how many should it send?

Nathan A. - Server Concierge: I would recommend configuring your mail service to use our relay server. You can then use 'localhost' in the script. This will allow the mail service to manage the sending of the messages and will keep any unsent messages in the outgoing queue until another connection to the relay server can be made.

Nathan A. - Server Concierge: You can make any necessary modifications to the mail service and the retry times so that the messages can be sent in shorter time frames.

[my identity as client]: what is your relay server? i am willing to try anything -- so far i migraded to virtual dedicated hosting and I AM MOST UNIMPRESSED -- scripts that used to work no longer do

Nathan A. - Server Concierge: The correct relay server to use would be: s2smtpout.secureserver.net

[my identity as client]: yeah that's the server alright

[my identity as client]: i set up php.ini to use that as my SMTP server

[my identity as client]: and i CANNOT queue up emails

[my identity as client]: the script hangs when sending more than two

[my identity as client]: come on, you have to agree with me, this is unacceptable

Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you..... Thank you for your patience.

You have been connected to Jon M-Server Concierge.

[my identity as client]: i got cutoff

[my identity as client]: you gotta give me satusfaction here. i need to be able to queue up emails on the smtp server or it's NO GOOD TO ME

Jon M-Server Concierge: Please note: All Live Chat sessions are logged and may be monitored for security and quality assurance purposes.

Thank you for contacting Live Chat support for Virtual and Dedicated Servers. This is Jon. How can I help you?

[my identity as client]: here is where i was before i got cutoff

[pasted in content]

[my identity as client]: basically -- i need to be able queue up emails on the smtp server

[my identity as client]: and you guys just give me the runaround

[my identity as client]: it's infuriating

[my identity as client]: will someone please help me?

[my identity as client]: im paying you guys MONEY for what?\

Jon M-Server Concierge: We are only able to make sure that email is sending from the server. If you wish to modify how the server queues and sends email it would be the responsibility of you or your server administator to make the modification.

[my identity as client]: I AM THE SEVER ADMINISTRATOR!!!!

[my identity as client]: the problem is that your smtp server hangs if i send it more than a single email to relay

Jon M-Server Concierge: Since you are using an unassisted server plan you pay for access to a functional server. We can only provide basic assistance to ensure that it is accessible. We are unable to make custom modifications to the server configuration.

[my identity as client]: the thing is, though, that it is NOT functional

[my identity as client]: is it acceptable for the smtp server to hang for two minutes when i send it two emails to relay?

[my identity as client]: all i'm asking, and i keep asking for this, is that you fix your broken smtp server

[my identity as client]: please fix it!!!!!

[my identity as client]: i keep filling out trouble tickets and you keep not fixing it. at least give me a different smtp server to try -- this all worked when i was using ghetto shared hosting. now i have a dedicated server and you cant relay more than one email att a time?? come on!

I ended up reconfiguring the script I'd written so it only sent one email at a time every five seconds (a necessary rate to get 800 emails out in less than two hours). Making something happen that frequently is not easy on a Linux box, since cron has a granularity of a minute. I had to depend instead on a fast self-reloading browser window.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110428

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