Cron Based E-Mail Sending
 

This is a 3.6 specific port of the 3.5 Modification.

In default vBulletin if you send a large number of e-mails, vbulletin either puts them in it's queue and then attempts to send them as each user visits a page, or just simply tries to send them straight away (This is the case when you use the Administrators email users inteface).

As a result of this your server can become seriously overloaded very quickly - so sending several thousand e-mails (like a newsletter) can become very difficult (hours spent clicking 'next' in the ACP) - as a result of these problems, this very simple modification was born.

This modification does two things ;

1. E-mails from the ACP inteface are sent to the mail queue, not straight to the mail system.

2. The processing of the mail queue is set-up as a vb cron item.

Obviously for this to work, you must turn on e-mail queuing in the ACP options - set 'Use Mailqueue System' to 'Yes', and 'Number of Emails to Send Per Batch' to a realistic value (based on the cron setting, as below).

There are two realisitc options for the cron job, you can either set it to run every minute, and set the items to be processed to something small (like 10), or you can do what this modification does by default and set it to run every 10 minutes, and set the items to be processed to something larger (like 100).

Remember, 10 per minute = 600 per hour, 100 per 10 minutes is also 600 per hour. The numbers really depend on how quick you want large queues processed, and how much your mail server can handle in one go.

Once working, when using the ACP mail users inteface, remember you can set it to process 9999 at once (not 500 or whatever) as the mails will now go into the queue, not be sent directly.

Note: This modification will affect any queued e-mails such as subscription e-mails. It will not affect registration e-mails as they bypass queuing anyway.


Upgrading from the 3.5 version.
If you have the 3.5 version installed then you don't need to upgrade - however if you decide to upgrade then you need to delete the current cron job in the Scheduled Tasks Manager and then import the product xml via the ACP Product Manager. The file edits do not need to be changed.


Queue Size

Antivirus has posted a nifty little addon that displays the current size of the mail queue here.



History:

v1.12 : First Release for vB 3.6.

what's changed between versions Paul?

/me clicks install

Would this be a good solution for email limits set by a web host? The host I am with currently limits me to 200 emails per hour, and will disable the mail should I go over that. If I set it to 100, and the interval to 1 hour that would get by the limit with room to spare.

Would that be possible with this mod?

set this to run once an hour.

set your emails to send out batches of 85 and you shuold be more than fine.

Not much really, this basically just completes the porting of my 3.5 mods - which is why it says you can carry on running the 3.5 version if you already have it installed. The only significant change is that you don't need to manually create the cron task when installing it, the product does that (and it runs every 10 mins now, not 15).

Great news. I can send out announcments again :)

I will install soon. Thanks for posting it.

This is brilliant, I spent an hour sending out emails the other day, and then firefox crashed half way through after sending 20 000 emails and then I had to try and find a user that was around that number, so I didnt send duplicates to the first 20 000 again, it was a real pain lol

Thanks.

screenshots...???? :s

Your kidding, what would I post a screen shot of ?

the screenshots would be exactly the same as 3.5 ... see above.

I've installed this.
It's automatically set to send a certain amount of emails at a certain amount of time? I don't need to do anything to these settings?

If I do, where do I do it?

Thanks! I hope this works for me, My members are always saying they never receive my emails.

Read the notes in the first post. :)

Thanks Paul, I did, maybe I'm missing it but.......where do *I set it*?

Lines above that ;

lol Ok, I did all of that, thank you!

I think I was wondering where to set the how many and the time?

But that's ok, thanks Paul!

How do we setup the cron job you mention, there is no howto about this?

I would like to use this great hack if only I knew how to do that.

"remember you can set it to process 9999"

is 9999 the maximum or can it be set to whatever the number of registered members is?

Importing the product creates the vb cron job automatically.

As I recall, 9999 is the max that you can set.

WOuld it be possible to set it to a larger number for large forums please? Thanks.

That limit is nothing to do with this modification, it's part of standard vb.

Yes but will I be able to send the email to more than 9999 members? If not this would be useless to forums with more than 10.000 users...

Thanks

I take it you have not used the ACP to email members.

The number is simply the limit to send in one batch (before you have to press a button to move to the next screen, and send the next batch). There is no limit to how many members you can e-mail.

Yes I use it frequently. I understand that it's just to limit the nr in a batch. I thought however that if I use 9999 and this hack it would stop at 9999 and not send an email to the rest of the members...

But after 9999 I would have to click the next button again right? It would be awesome if I could just click once and let it email all members without clicking next.

Well actually, looking at the page you can set the number as high as you want (I just tried it with 999999).

Yes I just tried it with 30000, works perfectly, again: great hack :D

Don't forget to mark as installed then. :)

Yes i did right after posting , good luck with the hotm :)

dummy question: How can i use the cronlog? for example, i sent a mail to 49000 users, all i got is two lines of log:

is it now sent on this two times?

I don't understand what you are asking.

I'm wondering if this would have any effect on the CommBull newsletter add-on (not sure how that one sends emails currently).

Or is only likely to be useful if I use the vBulletin built-in mass emal feature?

I have no idea, as I know nothing about commbull.

If commbull puts the emails into the vb queue then they will be processed by this mod, if commbull uses some other method then they won't.

i want to know: Are the mails sent or not? And how can i check this?
I have only two logs, but in my mailqueue i set it to 100 mail per batch, so i must have more then 2 logs, right?

Hi Paul,

Could I set this up to send a newsletter every Monday at 9am for example?

Thanks,

Patrick

I cannot tell you if you mails were sent, check your server logs. If you actually put 49,000 emails in the queue then it would take many hours to send them, and there would be loads of cron entries, which suggests to me that either you didn't send 49,000 via the ACP e-mail user function, or you didn't do the file edits correctly (or at all).

No, I think you misunderstand what this is for. This simply changes the way queued mails are sent by vb, and also edits the ACP function to send mails to the queue. This is not a mod to produce newsletters.

Ok thanks Paul. :)

i do everything but i cant find mail content block ? where i write mail content ?

Admin CP > Users > Send Email To Users

just perfect ... I've modified commbull to use it too, along with automated Generation of commbull.

Thank you.

I've installed it, and it seems to have worked, but the problem is that the server seems to have stopped sending mail notifications for new replies and stuff!!

Just wondering are file edits still necessary? because I hate doing file edits. Is it possible for this hack to be updated so this is not needed?

Thanks.