Hey @bluedot,
Thanks for the review and trying out MailPoet!
We’re sorry to hear that your experience did not match your expectations.
You have a fair point regarding the sending queue table – if your setup requires use of many welcome (e.g. to emulate a Drip campaign) or automatic emails, the size of the table may indeed grow faster.
Besides the apparent size of the tables, are there any other issues you are running into with MailPoet?
Normally neither the size of the table nor the number of tables should be an issue at these scales.
Modern database systems are able to easily handle multiple orders of magnitude more of data, and even then due to the way the data is stored it should have minimal impact on your site and its performance.
What usually matters more is how MailPoet accesses and manages this data, which we put great care in ensuring it remains fast.
Larger MailPoet users are sending frequent emails to larger lists without issues.
What perhaps could be a sticky point for you is if the hosting company enforces a relatively low DB size limit, in which case you may need to either request an increase, or, as our support staff suggested – eliminating some of the old emails.
As for backups – you have another very valid point. If the backup is stored in plain text – the backup size will be larger as well.
However, some backup plugins or hosting companies offer compressed versions of backups – see if that’s the case for you. Data stored in the “Sending Queue” table usually compresses very well, and you may find it compressing down to a small portion of the original size.
We currently do not offer functionality to automatically remove old data, but you feel this would be valuable to you – could you please suggest it on our feedback board? (https://feedback.mailpoet.com/)
If other users of MailPoet would be interested – we will consider it for future improvements.
Thank you!