Every so often I get a call on the Help Desk from someone who says that their GoldMine email campaign is failing in the middle of the send and they are not sure why.
If this is happening to you, the following are most likely the reason(s) and some things you should do and/or check for to prevent this from happening.
First lets talk about what happens during the sending of an email broadcast from GoldMine. The first thing you should do when sending a mass emailing is that you should always select “Que For Delivery” vs clicking the “Send Now” option from the email merge properties window. The reason for this is so that if GoldMine crashes or if the send fails you still have the emails that didn’t get sent still waiting in the Outbox in the Email Center. If you just hit Send Now GoldMine is going to start sending an email one at a time to whom ever you have selected in the Filter/Groups option, and if GoldMine crashes or if the send fails, you have no way of easily knowing who was sent an email and who wasn’t. Not to say we couldn’t create a complex SQL Query to determine who did or didn’t, but it is much easier to just have selected Que For Delivery vs Send Now at the start. Okay so now that we have that part out of the way, lets address why the sending of a mass email campaign in GoldMine might fail or crash GoldMine.
The sending of a mass email campaign in GoldMine is a very labor intensive process for GoldMine to handle, and if you do it from your own workstation, you are literally “held hostage” by that process until it completes. If you attempt to start using GoldMine while its sending a broadcast, you’re likely to discover that GoldMine will run slow on your machine, and might even crash. What we suggest is that you do any sort of broadcast from a dedicated machine that you do not use on a regular basis, and then once the sending has started, go back to your own computer and keep working in GoldMine.
Another reason why GoldMine might crash or the send might stop/fail during the sending process is due to MalFormed emails in the GoldMine database. What are malformed emails you ask? These are emails in the database that are not properly formatted as an email, ie, they are missing the @ sign, or the .com or they have an extra @ sign, or an extra . at the end like .com., I have even seen where phone numbers where some how entered into the email address field. Any number of reasons like these will cause the sending of the emails to fail during the broadcast. GoldMine will attempt one by one to send an email to each contact defined by your filter/group, and when it comes to one that is malformed it will stop sending any other emails. So what you need to do is fix/clean-up your database and remove all of the malformed emails. How do you do that you ask? Well if you are running GoldMine Coporate or GoldMine Premium Edition (SQL backend) we can run a SQL Query to identify the malformed emails and create a group of contacts with malformed email addresses, so that you can go through that group and clean them up.
Here is that SQL Query:
SELECT accountno, cs.contsupref AS ‘E-Mail Address’, cs.Address2 AS ‘Contact’
FROM contsupp as cs
WHERE (cs.CONTACT = ‘E-mail Address’)
AND (SELECT CASE
WHEN cs.contsupref IS NULL
OR CHARINDEX(‘@.’,cs.contsupref ) > 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘.@’,cs.contsupref ) > 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘..’,cs.contsupref ) > 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘”‘, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘(‘, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘)’, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘,’, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘<‘, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘>’, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘;’, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘:’, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘[‘, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR CHARINDEX(‘]’, cs.contsupref ) <> 0
OR RIGHT(RTRIM(cs.contsupref ),1) = ‘.’
OR CHARINDEX(‘ ‘,LTRIM(RTRIM(cs.contsupref ))) > 0
OR LEN(cs.contsupref )-1 <= CHARINDEX(‘.’, cs.contsupref )
OR cs.contsupref LIKE ‘%@%@%’
OR cs.contsupref NOT LIKE ‘%@%.%’ THEN 0
ELSE 1
END) = 0
If you are not sure how to run the above SQL Query or if you are experiencing other issues with your broadcasts please contact First Direct Corp at (845) 221-3800, so that we can troubleshoot what might be causing your issues.
