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.

[Chimpie]

Originally Posted by Paul M

It cant, like I said, its nothing to do with that.

Its the ACP > Users > Send Email to Users.

Hey Paul... just seeking some clarification here...

Are you saying that this mod will not affect the Send Email to Users, or will it also work with Send Email to Users?

EDIT:And I'm overlooking the obvious here, but where do we make the change from running the cron every 10 minutes to every 5 minutes (or whatever)?

[i.s.s.w]

thank Paul M

i am testing good

[yahoooh]

after install this product some e-mail not show the bburl option correctly
like: $vboptions[bbtitle] , $vboptions[bburl]

[Paul M]

This does not alter the content of e-mails.

[txspaderz]

Marked as Installed. Thanks for this great add-on!!!!

[Chimpie]

Just want to add a thank you to this thread. This mod is working out nicely.

:thumbsup:

My forum has around a thousand members and I have two crons set up for this. I send out 10 emails every 5 minutes. This shouldn't raise any flags with any ISPs.

[StonePilot]

How to set this to send email out every minute? I made two cron jobs running 0-10-20-30-40-50, and 5-15-25-35-45-55. Even at this, it's taking hours to send emails out. Granted, I have nearly 10,000 emails to ship, maybe I would be better off sending though a third-party email system at this point.

[Paul M]

Set all the options in the vb cron to "*" and it should run the cron once a minute.

[mayanks]

Hi Paul,

Could you please let me know if these settings are fine ? i have 18K+ members on my board

Thanks

[Chimpie]

For those who have upgraded to vB v3.7.3 remember to update the associated php files.