Wonderful Web Women

On Friday 1st August Wonderful Web Women turned 1. I can hardly believe it. Jan “The Wonderful Money Woman” had filled the office with balloons, friends came with champagne and I sat down to write you an email to tell you about our birthday competition - and then I saw it.

The email I sent the night before had gone into some “Ground Hog Day” (have you seen the movie?) loop and had been sending the same email out over and over and over. AHHH!!! OK, so my reaction may have been one of panic but I’m sure you can understand. This took me back to a few months ago when something very similar happened. So I knew how bad it could get but I also knew there was a solution. You can read what happened last time and the way we solved it in these other 2 articles.
http://wonderfulwebwomen.com/blog/2008/what-do-emails-and-plumbing-have-in-common/
http://wonderfulwebwomen.com/blog/2008/why-email-is-like-plumbing-part-2/

Why emaiil is like plumbing

You know, this problem is just like when the faucet blows on your kitchen tap. You know, where the water comes out. You can’t get the tap to screw back in and water gushes everywhere, creating a disaster. The only thing you can do is turn off the water at the mains while you get in a plumber.

That’s just like this problem. We deleted the email from the system. Didn’t work.
If people unsubscribed (mass unsubscribes = marketers worst nightmare) it didn’t work because the emails were not playing by human’s rules.

Only solution: Bring in the big plumbers. Our wonderful web host, Kenneth Fox from www.wonderfulwebhosting.com came to the rescue and our new best friends in India, Kunal and Satyender who created our software came too. This really emphasised the importance I discussed in my last articles of developing a relationship with your key internet suppliers.

We are so lucky to have brought in Charly Leetham to our team recently. Charly is our new Tech Support Wonder Woman and she has now been baptised by fire! So great to have a plumbing contractor who can talk plumbing speak with our suppliers!

It turns out our problem was slightly different this time. Now, we had overextended the memory limit that is usual for a web host to set. When we send out an email, the system collects all the email addresses and the the newsletter, stores it all in it’s memory and then sends it out. It seems as if it coud only store a certain amount of info then reached it’s limit. So it sent out the emails and tried again etc etc etc. AHHH!!! So some people got bombarded with emails, and some never heard from us.

So that’s my non-technie explanation for you.

Thank you so much for you understanding, we only received kind emails. You can read about why this happened in this blog post and how we solved it. But there is always a positive in Janet’s World

We discovered the reason we had the problem is because we have grown the be the largest and most successful web site using this software (the developers told us they were proud of us, isn’t that sweet). So we are like the canary down the coal mine. We discover the problems and they get fixed so people we work with to create their membership sites won’t experience the pain.
So thanks for your patience.

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