FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

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General Questions

• What is EGGS?

• Is there a limit as to many subcribers can E.G.G.S. handle. Like 10,000? 1 Million? How long does it take to email, say 10,000 subcribers? How do you know when it is done emailing? What happens if I close the browser? How much bandwidth does one email address use when sending messages?

• Does E.G.G.S. work on MAC,  Netscape, Opera, AOL ?  Does it work on Windows NT Servers, or Linux?

• What are the advantages of buying your own autoresponder software?

• What are the disadvantages ?

Cron explained

• What is cron?

• When using the CPanel, what is the correct path of Cron?

• I want my messages to go out closer to the time of day that they were requested. If I set the cron Job to run hourly, or on the minute, will this work?

• My host doesn't allow cron. My understanding is that cron is needed so that emails can be scheduled to be sent periodically.

• On my host mailout.php and capture.php need chmod 744 (from 644) to run.
  

Install and Set-up

• When adding an autoresponder it asks a bunch of questions. Am I supposed to setup a pop3 email first, and then configure these questions to that? If so, are the autoresponder email, subscription email both the same, (and probably all the other email addresses also)?

• When setting up the Local Host Name in the Install.htm, do you need to specify the port number? For example: localhost:3306

• Is it important to use ASCI mode when I FTP the *.cgi Scripts to my server? I know with many programs this can have an affect. There is no mention of this in the installation guide.
  
  
  

ANSWERS

What is E.G.G.S?

It is a new autoresponder software that you can run from your own web host or server.

Is there a limit as to many subcribers can E.G.G.S. handle. Like 10,000? 1 Million? How long does it take to email, say 10,000 subcribers? How do you know when it is done emailing? What happens if I close the browser? How much bandwidth does one email address use when sending messages?

1- EGGS has no limit on number of subscribers. But it depends on how much load your server can bear. Especially how much MySql space you have. (1000 entries of users approximately take 56,000 bytes + 40% for index. So for 1 Million users the calculation will be:

Data 54,688 KB
Index 24,049 KB
Total 78,737 KB

2-a EGGS is capable of sending approximately 200,000 mails in 2 hours, but it depends on the size of the message. The greater the size, the longer the time. ( Mail size calculation is explained later )

2-b Closing the browser window will stop the mailing process. This is to visually display the result of mail broadcast and notify you of any error occurred during the mailing process.

3- Bandwidth usage is dependent on the size of the message. Note that EGGS does not send all mail at once, but send them one by one to each user. This way chocking the server or crashing it or mail timeout issues are avoided. So for example if size of the message is 5KB, it’s using 5KB bandwidth constantly when mailing.

Calculate the message size with this formula:

Mail Size = 1KB (fixed header) + 1.53KB (EGGS Logo, In HTML format only) + Message text size + File attachment size + Size of extra headers for outgoing mails forced by your web hosting company (if any)

Example:

Message text = 2 KB
File Attachment = 10 KB
Extra Headers = 0 KB
Message format = HTML

Mail Size = 1+1.53+2+5+0
= 9.95 KB

Another factor is the mail sending setting on your mail server. Some mail servers have setting to send mail immediately without queuing. But some queue mails and send them after some delay, say an hour or so.

 

Does E.G.G.S. work on MAC,  Netscape, Opera, AOL ?  Does it work on Windows NT Servers, or Linux?

1- EGGS can be viewed on all broswers and all operating systems. Provided:
a- They are capable of javascript
b- They support cookies.

Some browsers may not display CSS properly though.

2- EGGS installation is built and tested for UNIX and its clones only. It can work on Microsoft Windows platform only if they support:
a- Running php scripts
b- Have MySql database
c- Sending mail from php script
d- Setting cron jobs.

What are the advantages of buying your own autoresponder software?

You own it, nobody can take a look at how many or who your subscribers are. You own the software so that means even if we close down this website, you can have your software up and running without relying on us.

How many subscribers can I have?

E.G.G.S. has been designed to handle hundreds, even million of subscribers. 

 

When using the CPanel, what is the correct path of Cron?

To understand how to work with cron tab manager in CPanel, check out the Cpanel user manual at: 

           http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cp/cronJobs.htm

Before you setup your EGGS scripts for cron, you need to know two things:

1- The absolute path of php interpreter on your webhost server.

Usually, this is :

        /usr/bin/php

2- The absolute path of your EGGS installation.

On web hosting machines, your web root directory usually looks
something like this:  

       /homes/username/public_html/

where username is the user name/main directory assigned to you by
your webhost on the hosting server.

So if you have a website named 'website01' and you have installed
EGGS in a directory named 'eggs' inside 'website01', your absolute path
will something like this:

       /homes/username/public_html/website01/eggs/


With this in mind, you have to cron two scripts for daily execution
capture.php and mailout.php

Hence, the absolute paths for your EGGS scripts become:

      /homes/username/public_html/website01/eggs/capture.php
      /homes/username/public_html/website01/eggs/mailout.php

To understand the syntax of cron is beyond the scope of this discussion forum. However, the following urls may help:

       http://www.cgi-installation-guide.com/cron.shtml
       http://www.4webhelp.net/tutorials/misc/cron.php


Now to sum it all up, If your php path is :

      /usr/bin/php

and your script paths are:

     /homes/username/public_html/website01/eggs/capture.php
    /homes/username/public_html/website01/eggs/mailout.php

Your Croned php script entries may look like this:

00 00 * * * /usr/bin/php /homes/username/public_html/website01/eggs/capture.php
00 00 * * * /usr/bin/php /homes/username/public_html/website01/eggs/mailout.php

Which means to run the scripts capture.php and mailout.php at midnight each day.

In CPanel, you are given separate boxes for filling in the hour, minute, year, month, day etc. Its the command line text box where you will be typing php interpreter path and the script path.

I want my messages to go out closer to the time of day that they were requested. If I set the cron Job to run hourly, or on the minute, will this work?

Welcome message for subscribing by email is dependent on your cron schedule for capture.php

If it is set per minute, it will send an immediate welcome message. This way you can make the system closer to real-time. But running such cron jobs with very small interval puts a lot of stress on the server if your mailbox contains too many subscription requests or if there are many copies of EGGS installed.

Daily messages are independent of this setting (croning the mailout.php for less than 24 hours delay). As message sending checks only number of days in between messages and can not send any message before 24 hours after previous one.

My host doesn't allow cron. My understanding is that cron is needed so that emails can be scheduled to be sent periodically.

Although it is advised to have a web server capable of scheduling Cron jobs. But if your server is not allowing to schedule cron jobs, there are few scripts available on the Internet which allow you to simulate Cron jobs.

You may go to www.google.com and search for "fake cron" to find such scripts.
In our Forum, Malacka found 2 fake crons:

 

http://www.smarterscripts.com/cron/
http://seriousfun.co.nz/tuisoft/fakecron.shtml/

On my host mailout.php and capture.php need chmod 744 (from 644) to run.

Some hosts have very restrictive settings on files that are need to be executed. capture.php and mailout.php require cron to execute them daily. Although scripts running through cron do not need additional permissions. Permission 644 works fine for executing the script via the PHP interpreter. We tested this on different web hosts running on Linux with CPanel interface to setup cron jobs and we didnt notice any problems. If you still require 744 permission, please let us know your hosting service url and whether you are using a control panel other than CPanel, CPanel X or PLESK to manage your website and for setting up cron jobs.

When adding an autoresponder it asks a bunch of questions. Am I supposed to setup a pop3 email first, and then configure these questions to that? If so, are the autoresponder email, subscription email both the same, (and probably all the other email addresses also)?

You need to configure pop3 email only if you want visitors to subscribe by email. If you don’t want to enable this feature, just leave the subscription email related fields blank and do not cron capture.php.

You should keep subscription email address different from rest of the email addresses as number of mails in this mail box may slow mail capture process.

Also for rest of email addresses, you may keep them same if you want to. But all of them have different purposes and it is advised to keep them different.

When setting up the Local Host Name in the Install.htm, do you need to specify the port number ? For example: localhost:3306

The default port for MySQL server is 3306. You don't need to specify this normally. Putting in localhost will work just fine.

But if your MySQL port is different (say 3424) on your hosting server, you may type in your MySQL host name and port:

localhost:3424

Furthermore, good web hosting companies cluster their database servers. Which means many database servers will be having same copies of your database replicated in the backend without you knowing. It will appear that there is only one MySQL database server machine but infact there may be many.

This is done to ensure that your database will be available to your needs, even if some of the servers go down from failure or for maintenance purposes.

In such an environment where there is server clustering andthe default MySQL server port is changed to something else, the input localhost:3424 will not work in your EGGS installation.

You will have to type in a specific IP address (say 64.32.1.4) or server machine name (e.g. yourservermachine.yourhost.com) for your MySQL database server and port instead:

e.g:
64.32.1.4:3424
or
yourservermachine.yourhost.com:3424

You may ask your webhost tech support for this information if you are not sure.

 

Is it important to use ASCI mode when I FTP the *.cgi Scripts to my server? I know with many programs this can have an affect. There is no mention of this in the installation guide.

Most of the currently available FTP software are capable of detecting file type automatically and you do not need to specify the transfer mode. But in case your FTP software requires to set the transfer type manually, you need to upload all the scripts as ASCII and all the images in Binary mode.