topic Re: Sending emails from SAS. in SAS Enterprise Guide

Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 10:25:29 GMT

Hi,

I have to send emails from SAS by fetching the data from a data set. I have the mail ids around 5000. Hence I am getting "WARNING: Email service not available". Hence I would like to send the first 200 mails first and hold the process for few seconds and start the process to send 201 to 400 and hold the process for the same few seconds and so on.

My data set looks as follows.

userid	mailid
100	abc@some.com
101	def@some.com
102	ghi@some.com
103	jkl@some.com
104	mno@some.com
105	pqr@some.com

All these are unique mail ids.

I am new to SAS and I wrote the code as below..but I am getting "WARNING: Email service not available" becuase of SMTP server timeout or heavy load.

%macro email;

FILENAME file_mail EMAIL LRECL=3200 TYPE='text/html';

     DATA _NULL_;
          SET emails END=EOF;
          BY mailid userid;
          FILE file_mail;

               put '!EM_TO!' mailid;
               put '!EM_SUBJECT!' 'Test Plans have been created.';
               put 'The following test plans have been created with you as a tester.';
               put '<br>';
               link = '<a href="' ||left(strip(userid)) || '">' ||'</a>'
               put '!EM_SEND!';
               put '!EM_NEWMSG!';
                    if EOF then
                         put '!EM_ABORT!';

RUN;

%mend;
%email;

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 12:21:09 GMT

You could do this in the data step:

retain counter 0;

counter + 1;

if counter = 200 then do;

counter = 0;

sleep(2);

end;

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

esjackso — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 12:36:06 GMT

I think you can skip the counter and use:

if mod(_n_,200) = 0 then sleep(2);

Eric

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 12:40:33 GMT

Of course, but calling the mod() function with every iteration may unnecessarily eat CPU cycles. Blame it on the old-school programmer in me

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 06:04:42 GMT

Thanks for your reply.

Its throwing an error after including the above either of the above two codes in DATA STEO, like

"ERROR: Undeclared array referenced: sleep."

Could you please write the entire code.

Many thanks in advance.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 07:38:16 GMT

my bad; did some C lately, where one calls a function like a procedure.

use

call sleep(2);

instead of

sleep(2);

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 08:17:37 GMT

: Thanks for the information provided.

Yes you are right ,I am able to send mail a maximum of 499 after that I am getting that ERROR message.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 08:19:06 GMT

: Yeh now its not throwing error. But still I am unable to send the mails after 499 records eventhough I included the call sleep in the data step.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

jakarman — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 08:27:03 GMT

That number of 499 is weird a human setting to be expected at the server side. Is it possible?

- https://itservices.stanford.edu/service/emailcalendar/email/spam/limit (zimbra)

- Exchange Online Protection Limits | Exchange Online Protection Service Description (number of outbound message send)

The error message should probably not some unexplainable error but one telling a limit like this has been reached

Can you validate this?

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 08:33:57 GMT

Then it is not a load problem, you most probably are not allowed to send >= 500 emails in one action.

So I'd suggest to split the data set into chunks < 500 and iterate through these with a macro.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:08:02 GMT

: Yes you are right. But its related to production.Hence the data will increase gradually and the number of tables also will be increase.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:15:10 GMT

Yes, you need to write the macro in a way to be flexible, so it does do your work for you in the future.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

jakarman — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:24:02 GMT

Why not talk to the mail-server administrator, he had control on that number of mails.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 11:14:38 GMT

: Yes we need to right the macro.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 11:20:55 GMT

: I am not aware like whether the mail-server admin can have the control over the number of mails to be trigger. I need to investigate on this more.

Re: Sending emails from SAS.

K_HARI__PRASAD — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 12:45:01 GMT

;;;-------------

Its working fine now..Just I increased the sleep time to 120 sec. Below is the findal code for that fix

if mod(_n_,200) = 0 then sleep(120);

Thanks a lot to both of you..

Regards

Hari Prasad K.