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As of 24 Nov 2017 this modification has been withdrawn.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.

[GoTTi]

ya I set
Number of Emails to Send Per Batch to 80. so that was right

[Paul M]

Originally Posted by microbob

I'd really like to use your mod here but I haven't heard back from you. Can you help me get this working and address my issue in post # 292 and #295?

From what I have read, you will need someone to spend time checking your actually installation, there is nothing obviously wrong in your posts.

Im afraid I simply do not have the time to do that atm.

[GoTTi]

paul it has taken days to send these emails....and there is still 1000 remaining. am I missing something?

[Paul M]

Maybe you dont have enough traffic to trigger the cron system every 10 minutes.

Other than that, no idea really, many things could affect it.

[SVTCobraLTD]

Working in 3.8.8.

[adwade]

[s]When making the file revisions, I could not find the string: exec_mail_queue(); (within includes/functions.php)[/s]

Nevermind, as when I FTP'd my functions.php file the connection stalled and I did not get the entire file.(i.e. just 164kb out of 177kb) Once I discovered that and re-downloaded the file, I found the string I needed to edit then!