How many Tasks can I add to a Chilkat Task Chain?

Question

How many Tasks can I add to a Task Chain? I'm using the ActiveX component.

Specifically I'm adding emails using MailMan.SendMailAsync and will have thousands of emails queued.

Answer 1

Theoretically there is no limit, other than eventual memory limitations.

In any case, I wouldn't recommend it as a solution for sending thousands of emails. The reason is that here is no good way to handle external problems that may occur midway in the sending process, such as network or mail server problems.

A better and more scalable approach might be to write all the .eml files to a directory. You could write code to do the following until the "mail queue directory" is empty.

• Select a .eml in the directory.
• Load it into a Chilkat Email object.
• Send the email using Chilkat MailMan via the SendEmail or SendEmailAsync method.

If your programming language allows you to create background threads, then you could create N threads, each with its own MailMan object that does the above. You would want to control/synchronize access to .eml files in some way to ensure that no two threads simultaneously choose the same .eml file. Also, N would limited to the number of connections from the same IP an SMTP server might allow.

If you're sending the same email to each recipient, or the same email template with replacements, then there's no need to actually write the full email for every recipient ahead of time. You could just manage the list, and for each subsequent email just update it with a new To/CC/BCC address (taking care to clear the To/CC/BCC email addresses from the Email object prior to calling AddTo/AddCc/AddBcc to add the new email address, otherwise the recipient list in the email grows with each iteration), do subject/body string replacements, etc. and send.