Well, after about 6-8 hours had passed since I sent my e-card out, I asked Deidre, Laina and Frank if they’d gotten it and none of them had.  So, I started to realize something was amiss, particularly since I hadn’t gotten it in either of my web-based accounts either.

So, I went to HostGator’s site to talk to tech support and they basically said, “Sorry….200 messages per hour, period. Oh, and Mailman doesn’t have the option to adjust the sending frequency, so tough shit, the rest of your messages got deleted.”  So, I was PISSED!  Why would they let you add more than 200 subscribers when, with the way they have it set up, you can’t ever send to more than 200 with Mailman?  Why not just have a notice that says “If you have more than 200 subscribers, you MUST use PHPList in order for all your subscribers to receive your messages.”??? Then, I wouldn’t have spent HOURS configuring and testing Mailman.  DAMNIT!

As a result, I’ve spent the entire night configuring, reading up on and testing PHPList with various web-based email accounts – I set up ones for Hotmail and Mail.com and already have Yahoo! and GMail.  So, after about 4 hours or so, I finally got it figured out and started the sending queue.  PHPList lets you set a delay between messages.  So, I did  a little math and found that if I wait 20 seconds between messages, that will keep me under the 200 per hour limit and leave me a little room for other messages in between.

The good thing about PHPList is that it lets you send multi-part HTML/Plain Text messages and also it’s designed to be an announce list so you don’t have to worry about making sure users are moderated and stuff which was a big pain with previous mailing list software I’ve used.

Now, the queue is underway and it’s sent the message to about 342 of my 887 subscribers so far.  In total, it’s going to take about 5 hours to send, which will be the case every time I send a  newsletter.  Oh, joy!  But, at least I know it’ll go out.

The house is a bit of a mess – well, at least the kitchen is – so I have to tidy up when I get up (guess I have to go to bed, first, right?).  Also need to do the laundry since I had to deal with this mailing list thing instead of washing clothes like I intended.

Laina has had me looking at profiles on SuperDyke of people she’s been talking to and stuff.  Some of them are OK, some of them are like “WHAAAAAAAT?”  I saw Cheryl Brown’s profile on there under the nick CritterSitter – good one!

Guess I’m going to head back to the bed for a little while.  I don’t want to spend the entire day in bed.  I really don’t like my sleeping hours being so ass-backwards.  But, when you have no specific things to get up for, it’s hard to change them.  Also, with Frank and Laina online most of the time to keep me company, it’s really not that lonely.

Need to be sure to take out my contacts tonight.  I get lazy about it – not for the taking them out, but for the having to put them back in, but I don’t want to damage my eyes.  *groan*

And, with that, I’m off!