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As of 24 Nov 2017 this modification has been withdrawn.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

[Rene Kriest]

Finally I need this addon since my forum is getting more and more members.

[Derek Chai]

The cron isn't working for some reason. I had it set at every minute and now it's at the default every 10 and it isn't running according to the logs. I have about 200k mails in the quene.

[Paul M]

Have you tried to run it manually ?

[RedFoxy]

there is an admin/stats panel for that version?

[Battle_Ring]

Thank you , moved t oa new host and they have a 200 emails per hour limit

[Battle_Ring]

how do we set up the cron for this there is no intructions???

[Derek Chai]

Wait, how does the quene work? I heard you need visitors? What do you mean by manually? If I click run now it says processing etc.

[Battle_Ring]

nevermind i see it already sets it up for you.

[Battle_Ring]

When you send an email shouldnt it send the first batch right then, then the next bath at the tim you input. As of right now it doesnt send any when you first send it waits for the first que time to come around.

Anyway to change that?