AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I put this in UserVoice some time ago but please understand this scenario. You have an ecommerce web site with a high rate of orders. You have to reboot your email server or something went down. How does AbleCommerce handle this?

It doesn't.

It should

How? Queue the emails and don't remove from the queue until they are successfully delivered. There are technologies to do this OR allow us to enter TWO email servers so we have a primary and secondary and if you can't queue them they then at least have another chance of making it to the recipient.

AbleCommerce should handle this. In the REAL world now everything is up all of the time. PLEASE realize the importance of ecommerce AND email and solve this problem.

Thank you.

I was looking for your uservoice request and found that you have a couple of them posted for the email issue.

RE: backup server
One customer suggested, that "you may be able to do this with your DNS entry. As I recall in DNS you can set a priority and if the higher priority server doesn't respond, the second in the list is tried."

This seems like a good work-around for now.

RE: system to queue mail within AbleCommerce

This feature request can be voted on here:
http://ablecommerce.uservoice.com/forum ... s-in-the-c

DNS is an invalid fix, AC needs to connect to a mail server to send email. If AC cannot "connect" such as login to send the email it will fail and show an error in AC. We are tied to a specific domain/IP for SMTP (sending) emails. It's different than an outside user sending emails to the domain and having different MX entries in DNS.

This is a critical situation in my opinion. I really suggest a simple fix of adding a second SMTP entry in AC "Secondary E-mail server" and AC tries the first, if it errors it steps to the secondary. It is not a hard thing to implement. Please share this idea with development.

Please share this idea with development.

I will. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Ideally though, AC should also add support for a pickup location or a queue and until that message successfully sends it should be able to go into a retry.

JYI in Gold we implemented event handler is replaceable service. This means one can provide custom handling for ablecommerce events. For example you can create a some suitable data structure to create a queue of messages as events are triggered and data is passed. A separate service may process the queue to trigger and remove messages upon success.

I was thinking of that and along that line have you considered (or add a suggestion) to completely abstract the mail handler itself? Implement an interface INotification or IMailHandler for example and let us plug in (or develop an add-on) for more powerful email handling?