Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Cron based e-mail sending

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This modification has been withdrawn.
vBulletin 4.0.x and 4.1.x are no longer supported.

The feature is already built into the core vBulletin 4.2.x code.
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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 helps in three ways ;

1. The processing of the mail queue is set-up as a vbulletin cron item.

2. You can add a small delay before each e-mail is sent (0,1,2 or 5 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 use e-mail queuing (ACP Options - Use Mailqueue System = Yes) and also the 'Number of Emails to Send Per Batch' needs to be a realistic value (see below). The installation process will attempt to set these options for you. This modification also requires two file edits to work correctly.

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 80, which is the default).

Remember, 10 e-mails per minute = 600 per hour while 80 e-mails every 10 minutes is 480 per hour. The numbers you set really depend on how quick you want large queues processed, and how much your mail server can handle in one go. The default settings are fine for most people.

Once working, when using the ACP mail users inteface, remember you can set it to process 9999 at once (not 500) as the mails will now go into the queue, not be sent directly.

Note: This modification will only affect queued e-mails such as subscription e-mails. It will not affect registration e-mails as they always bypass queuing.

This modification also displays the size of the e-mail queue in the ACP homepage, based on code supplied by Antivirus.

To install, download and uzip the files, then follow the instructions in the text file.


History:

v4.0.1 : 30-Dec-2009 : Initial release for vb 4.0.0 Gold.

v4.1.0 : 04-Dec-2010 : Updated for vBulletin 4.1.

v4.1.7.0 : 16-Oct-2011 : Updated for vBulletin 4.1.7.

[Paul M]

You would need a new version each time the vbulletin file changed.

[Sworm]

Hi Paul it work on 4.1.9? Thanks.... great job like ever!

[athlon64bit]

For me it did not work on 4.1.9 nor does it work on 4.1.10. Avatars won't display, reply function to posts, pms etc malfunctions,, browsers such as firefox and opera, only have white screen for adminCP and the emails fail to send. I guess we need to wait for an update for this add-on. If anyone knows of a work around for my problems I would welcome in.
The problems I describe appear to result from editing the includes/functions.php file.

[Paul M]

I suggest you check your edit.

[athlon64bit]

Originally Posted by Paul M

I suggest you check your edit.

I have multiple times and I have read over this thread. I have uninstalled/reinstalled multiple times. I am at a loss. Maybe it is something to do with another add-on conflicting? Or something to do with my web server/web host? Thanks for getting back to me.

This is what I see on opera browser, in adminCP, after editing the functions file, in opera browser,



. Dunno if that helps. Replying to threads, won't work, box won't load to type in; avatars won't display and the whole forum becomes unusable with all browsers.

[Paul M]

That's a BOM mark - added to files when you edit then in something like notepad (on windows 7).
It will 100% break a php file as the server will have a fit over it. You need to find a text editor that doesnt do this.

[beatyourtruck]

Originally Posted by arkueckelhan

Paul. I will post if things change, but if anyone else is having this problem, it seems that mine was due to some issue when editing functions.php in notepad... using notepad ++ solved the issue. I recall having a similar issue back in the day and hopefully this will fix that as well!

Thank you! Was having the same issue with Notepad and Windows 7. Notepad ++ solved my issue also.

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

[arkueckelhan]

The cron system was working but recently my site is taking EXCESSIVE amounts of time to start adding emails to the queue (the point right after your write the email and the default value is 500). I dropped the value to 50 and still it is about 4 minutes to add a set of 50 emails. It is NOT sending them out and is successfully adding them to the queue for later processing.

Any thoughts on what is going on?

I recently have cached my pages as well as vbseo, added vb optimise and vb4 supercharged (plug-ins) to my site. Do you know if one of these is causing the issue?
---- I haven't sent any emails out in about 3 months so couldn't tell you if the issue followed one of these things or not.

[final kaoss]

Well, looks like we won't be needing this mod any more.

Cron-Based Batch Email Sending
Previously, any attempt to send email to a large number of forum users might have resulted in overloading your server and/or running the risk of exceeding your web host's email send limit. We've added batch email sending via cron job to version 4.2 to help you avoid such issues.

[Paul M]

Correct, its been added to the 4.2 core.