Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Cron based e-mail sending

As of 24 Nov 2017 this modification has been withdrawn.

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

The result of this can be that your server can gets seriously overloaded very quickly - or on many hosts, you get banned for exceeding their e-mail sending limits. This can make sending several thousand e-mails (like a newsletter) very difficult.

This modification does two things ;

1. The processing of the mail queue is set-up as a vbulletin cron item.

2. Allows you to add a small delay before each e-mail is sent (between 1 and 9 seconds).

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

Use option 2 carefully, otherwise you will slow your e-mail system right down.

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 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.

This modification includes the code by Antivirus that displays the current size of the mail queue.


History:

v3.8.001 : First Release for vB 3.8.

[SVTCobraLTD]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Its in the main post of the thread.

I would highly recommend putting ALL of the instruction in the downloaded instructions instead of just some of the instruction there and the rest in the thread.

[al98t]

installed, turned on, and set to 70. should put me around 420emails per hour!

thanks!

[ctrlbrk]

Brilliant mod, I really needed this, thank you!

Mike

[ctrlbrk]

BTW, would it please be possible to add a small bit of prioritization. Private Messages = highest, and Admin "Send email to users" (newsletters) = lowest.

I am sending over 10,000 email newsletter-type messages right now, which is fine if it takes a few hours. But not so cool if all private messages get delayed until this email blast is over.

There are currently 10,455 unsent emails remaining in the mail queue.

Mike

[Paul M]

Sorry, there is no priority concept in vbulletin, adding one is beyond the scope of this mod.

[ctrlbrk]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Sorry, there is priority concept in vbulletin, adding one is beyond the scope of this mod.

OK. Well, I am happy to pay you for it, or make a nice size donation to your favorite charity. I can't find any good programmers anymore, have gone thru ten in the last two years, thrown good money after bad, and in the end no one programmer can ever do things right. Most can't even reply to emails.

So if I could somehow convince you -- at minimum the Private Message thing, it is very important for me.

Thx for all the work you've done.

Mike

[Paul M]

Oops, the word "no" was missing from my reply, not sure if you noticed that.

Adding a priority to the vb mail system would not be something that could be done by plugins, it would need code changes. Im afraid I simply dont have the time to look at such work (at least not unless you are very rich !).

[SVTCobraLTD]

Still no go. I send 300 hundred at once. Admincp page says 300 being processed, hit refresh 260, hit refresh 220 and so on. I have the settings as described in the first post and instructions and it's still processing them 40 at a time instead of 40 every 10 minutes.

[Paul M]

My previous reply still stands.

Im afraid there is nothing more I can tell you. Without admin and ftp access I cannot check you have done everything correctly.

[arkueckelhan]

I have been looking for this solution forever now. I can not describe how happy I am that you created this.

Thank you,
[marked as installed]