Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Cron Based E-Mail Sending

This modification is no longer available or supported.

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.

This modification includes the code by Antivirus that displays the current size of the mail queue (v3.7.002 onwards).

Version 3.7.003 has the option to add a small delay before each e-mail is sent (between 1 and 9 seconds). Use this option carefully.



History:

v3.7.001 : First Release for vB 3.7
v3.7.002 : Added mail queue size display code.
v3.7.003 : Added option for a delay between the sending of each e-mail.

[lebmobile]

i got this error : Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_DIV_EQUAL in /home/content/l/e/b/lebmobilehost/html/forum/includes/functions.php on line 791

[Paul M]

You need to check the edit you made to functions.php - you have made a mistake in it.

[lebmobile]

thank you man its done .. but i want to ask where i can change the value of minutes ?

[Paul M]

Value of minutes ?

[BigDog56]

I just went into my admin control panel and saw 10 emails in queue, yet I had not sent any. Is there a way to see which member is emailing people?

[Paul M]

Try looking in the email queue table (mysql).

[BigDog56]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Try looking in the email queue table (mysql).

Thank you, got it!

[lebmobile]

i want to run this plug in every 1 hour ..where i can set that

[Paul M]

Edit the cron job in schedule manager.

[kartik786]

i have over 75k members and it takes atleast a week for the queue to send mail to all of them.

please assist as to how to make these mails reach them quicker.

i m on a dedicated server.