How Can I Reduce / Elimintae the POP3 Idle Loop time

[Mike Wolfe]

We have SBS 2003 fully patched, and Outlook 2003 as our client.

To allow marketing to send Bulk emails, I do no go through our Exchange
server, as the ISP will not support the volumes (we send customized
individual Emails created by Email-Merge in Office).

In addition, for legacy reasons, our inbound Email (POP3 boxes) and
corporate website is hosted at a DIFFERENT ISP. This has caused increasing
issues with spam filters as our outbound IP (office external) is way
different than our MX inbound IP (Other ISP, and Website).

So, I have been attempting to simply generate the personalized bulk emails
here and transfer them to the other ISP using IMAP, and now POP3 protocols.
In this way, the outbound and inbound IP addresses are the same ISP, and same
as our site, so the spam filters let it all go through, and the only
rejections we get are real ones.

I have set up the profile(s), and and on the Tools | Options | Mail Setup
tab, have cleared the tickbox for send mail immediately, and changed the auto
send/receive times to 10 minutes, the theory being that we can generate them
at ~ 1 piece per second, and then every 10 minutes, outlook would log in to
the other ISP and dump all the outbox mail into the outbound mail servere
there.

Theory was good, but what's happening is (based on Outlook Logs):

Outlook is Logging in for each and every individual piece of mail.
Outlook send the current mail piece, then goes in to an 'idle loop' for
approx 5-6 seconds, meaning we get a throughput of ~ 8 per minute, which is
unacceptable with our 6000 piece monthly newsletters, etc.

So, my question is, can anyone tell me the registry setting to reduce this
idle loop, or better yet, how can I fordce it to simply transfer the entire
contents of the Outbox to our ISP in a single Login - my ideal would be for
outlook to wake up every 10-15 minutes, log in to the external ISP, transfer
all the mail in the outbox, the logout and wait anotehr 10-15 min. If I can
get that to wor, I can play with the Bulk generation counts and time periods
such that the smaller batches can go out in one hit, and the larger ones
broken into a manageable number of portions??

ANy ideas????
Thanks In Advance

Mike

 

[Brian Tillman]

We have SBS 2003 fully patched, and Outlook 2003 as our client.

To allow marketing to send Bulk emails, I do no go through our
Exchange server, as the ISP will not support the volumes (we send
customized individual Emails created by Email-Merge in Office).

In addition, for legacy reasons, our inbound Email (POP3 boxes) and
corporate website is hosted at a DIFFERENT ISP. This has caused
increasing issues with spam filters as our outbound IP (office
external) is way different than our MX inbound IP (Other ISP, and
Website).

So, I have been attempting to simply generate the personalized bulk
emails here and transfer them to the other ISP using IMAP, and now
POP3 protocols. In this way, the outbound and inbound IP addresses
are the same ISP, and same as our site, so the spam filters let it
all go through, and the only rejections we get are real ones.

I have set up the profile(s), and and on the Tools | Options | Mail
Setup tab, have cleared the tickbox for send mail immediately, and
changed the auto send/receive times to 10 minutes, the theory being
that we can generate them at ~ 1 piece per second, and then every 10
minutes, outlook would log in to the other ISP and dump all the
outbox mail into the outbound mail servere there.

Theory was good, but what's happening is (based on Outlook Logs):

Outlook is Logging in for each and every individual piece of mail.
Outlook send the current mail piece, then goes in to an 'idle loop'
for approx 5-6 seconds, meaning we get a throughput of ~ 8 per
minute, which is unacceptable with our 6000 piece monthly
newsletters, etc.

So, my question is, can anyone tell me the registry setting to reduce
this idle loop, or better yet, how can I fordce it to simply transfer
the entire contents of the Outbox to our ISP in a single Login - my
ideal would be for outlook to wake up every 10-15 minutes, log in to
the external ISP, transfer all the mail in the outbox, the logout and
wait anotehr 10-15 min. If I can get that to wor, I can play with
the Bulk generation counts and time periods such that the smaller
batches can go out in one hit, and the larger ones broken into a
manageable number of portions??

My opinion is that you'd be better off hiring a fulfillment house to do your
mass mailing.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Brian, if I had the volume to merit use of a fullfillment house, I
would do so.

But we don't, and we don't need one - this is an Outlook issue - if I
have multiple piecdes of mail in my Outbox, and Outlook connects to
the server it is supposed to mail them through, then it should drop
them all off in one login session, never mind going through the
ritual; for each piece. Even
that I can live with - computers do repetative things etc etc etc ,
but doing a 6 sec timeout for each piece is ridiculous!!

SO if I can eliminate the timeout, then we are happy, if I can
eliminate the extraordinary number of login/outs, then I am ecstatic.

Perhaps, then, one of the mass mailing add-ons to Outlook will help.
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/mail.htm#massmail