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As of 24 Nov 2017 this modification has been withdrawn.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

[Limode]

Total active user: 132,507
There are currently 131,004 unsent emails remaining in the mail queue. After Send Email to Users 8 hours

[greenspan]

Very useful indeed. Thanks so much!

[Paul M]

Originally Posted by Limode

Total active user: 132,507
There are currently 131,004 unsent emails remaining in the mail queue. After Send Email to Users 8 hours

130,000+ emails is an insane amount to send, and will take an extremely long time unless you use some high settings.

[Griffoneur]

I am a dumbass! I fixed my problem.

[demojames]

Thanks for this!

I just moved to a new hosting company and their limit was only 150 per hour, I got them to increase 750, but still way under my newsletter subscribers.

Will be testing it out today. Thanks again

UPDATED: tested and this hack works perfectly! All my subscribers got their newsletters and they're all happy.

[passwords]

after importing the product, where can i edit the settings ?
im not able to find them on my admin cp, should i edit the product file befor uploading it or what ?

[Paul M]

What setting(s) are you referring to ?

[passwords]

Hello Paul,
Thanx for replying, please i need to know a few things:
1- where can i set the number of email sent per hr, is it only by puting the number in the e-mail settings or i need to put it in an other place.
2- how can i remove the e-mails from the queue
thank you

[Paul M]

1. Please read the main (first) post, the settings are explained there.

2. You cant, unless you want to run direct sql on the relevant table.

[vwdforum]

Can anyone explain how to delete unsent emails, as I've sent to the wrong usergroup.