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This modification has been withdrawn.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.

[ZuFett]

I dont know exatly what i must do....
i want to write a newsletter. i write an e-mail, set the large to 9999 and now it list user by user after 5 seconds (under option I take 5 seconds). But i cant wait 5 seconds on each user, i have over 10.000 óô

What do i wrong?

[Paul M]

Why have you set it to 5 seconds ?

[ZuFett]

My Server can sent 1000 e-mails per hour. i have 13.000 Users :/

[ToNetU]

hello Paul,

just to make it clear to me i did this:

1- edited email.php & function.php
2- upload the plugin
3- "E-Mail Send Delay" set to [1 second]
4- Number of Emails to Send Per Batch = 80
5- i have more than +12,000 users.
6- i have no idea how many email i can send per hour.
7- i tried to send email to my registeration members WITHOUT this mod, and i got 505 error after it sent to the first 1,500 member.

am i good to go with this settings? or i have to change something?

thanks in advance for your help

[Paul M]

You do not need to set the e-mail delay to 1 second - leave it a zero. Its VERY rare that anyone should ever have to changed that setting.

[ToNetU]

Originally Posted by Paul M

You do not need to set the e-mail delay to 1 second - leave it a zero. Its VERY rare that anyone should ever have to changed that setting.

so once i change it to zero, am good to go?

EDIT: i will give this a try and i will let you know.

thanks

[ToNetU]

i gave this a try, and this is what happened:
1- ACP > Users > Send Email to Users.
2- i put 99999 to process at once.
3- i chose to send for only registeration members.
4- it was sending normaly email for each user.
5- Include users that have declined admin emails? > YES
6- wrote title & message to send.
7- clicked submit to send the emails.
8- process was good so far until it stopped on 2,639
9- i was waiting for it to move but after 5 minutes i gave up.
10- when i went to ACP again i found this > vBulletin E-Mail Queue = 3,*** something.
11- the number of the queue was decreasing til > There are no e-mails queued at the moment.

fortunatuly i passed the 1,500 limit and the some of my members recieved the email, unfortunately it didn't send for all of my members. [i gave this a try yesterday] so til now they didn't recieve anything.

thanks Paul

[joe1989]

One minor bug... Something with the file edits (not the upload, but while editing email.php and functions.php) resulted in my ACP not properly displaying the top bar (the one that says the current version and the most up-to-date version). I ended up re-uploading the original files from vB and it fixed it, so it's confirmed that it was a result of the file edits. Any thoughts?

[Paul M]

You didnt do the edits corectly would be my thought. There is no way they can have the effect you describe.

[ToNetU]

Originally Posted by Paul M

You didnt do the edits corectly would be my thought. There is no way they can have the effect you describe.

am still waiting an answer from you Paul, i really need to send an email for all my member and as i said in the above post, it didn't send to all my members? any thoughs?