Inside LabourStart

The story of LabourStart’s mailing lists is an epic saga — it goes on and on …

In early 2010 we settled on what seemed to be a good solution.  We had an inexpensive web hosting company in the USA (DirectNIC) and free, open source software (PHPlist) and it all seemed to finally work.

And then last week, DirectNIC informed us that as we were using a shared computer with other customers, we couldn’t do mass mailings.  And shut down our site without warning.

The person who initially recommended DirectNIC to us was using it, as we are, to send out mass mailings.  But his lists are obviously much smaller and his activity went unnoticed.

DirectNIC doesn’t offer dedicated servers, so we couldn’t just upgrade.

PHPlist itself does offer hosting, which sounds great, except that their peak plan is 100,000 messages a month (we send something like three times that amount) and even that would have cost us something like $2,160 a year (or triple that amount).

But we had an alternative — a virtual web host on the same company that hosts LabourStart (1&1 Internet) — which we set up two years ago.

Back in 2008, I tried to set up PHPlist there and didn’t succeed.  I even paid PHPlist to install it for us, but it still didn’t work, which is why I gave up and we tried other things (iContact, unionlists.org.uk).

I did, however, succeed this week.  (I must have learned something since 2008.)

I was able to import one of our three databases, the one hosting the mailing lists for Justice for Iranian Workers, Radio Labour and others.

Yesterday and the day before, I tried to import the much larger database holding LabourStart’s 70,000 plus subscribers and it repeatedly failed.  The import process would work for several hours and then generate odd error messages.

Desperate to get a mailing out as the IUF was eager for us to quickly promote their Coke Pakistan campaign, I improvised a solution.

I set up a version of PHPlist for LabourStart, configured it, and then imported (in blocks of 10,000 addresses at a time) LabourStart’s English language mailing list.

The mailing went out successfully.  The current web hosting company did throttle it, preventing us from sending out the mailing at top speed, but it appears to have all gone out.

This means that I now need to import each of the other lists in different languages, one by one, to recreate the templates and administrators for all of them, as well as to do this for the IUF.  It will be a lot of work, but I hope to have it completed by the weekend.

I ask everyone to be patient; I will inform individual editors who need to know.

The good news is that the software is identical, so there’s no learning curve.  All we’ve really done is move from one host to another.

Let’s just hope that this host leaves us alone and lets us send out our mailings in peace.