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This modification has been withdrawn.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]

Yes, that sounds right.

[ip-ip]

Hi,
I changed my server and went to a better server, my new server accepted 1000 send mails per hours and i think this is ok with your mod.
Default Number of Emails to Send Per Batch is 80, but Per Batch will take time is Unknown, How each Batch takes in Default option ?

[Paul M]

The default is every 10 minutes, if you set the batch to 150, that will give you 900 / hr.

[g00gl3r]

Just checking that still works with 4.1.5 etc?

[g00gl3r]

Seems so.

Am I being a bit daft or what here? Where are the options that I need to change to manage how many mails per hour go out? Am I changing the standard VB settings?

[g00gl3r]

Righteo.

Thread notification emails are not sending.

What setting do I need to change?

99% of our members have instant notification, could do without these being queued, we could lose traffic.

[Paul M]

There is no such setting, queuing them is hard coded into vb.

[g00gl3r]

Okay thanks paul. Which setting do I need to change to increase the emails per hour? I'll just increas that somewhat. Our spec server should take it. It's just when I did a mass mail on many forums at the same time we lagged a little.

Your mod is great by the way. Just need to tweak it to get these notifications out at least the same day.

[Paul M]

'Number of Emails to Send Per Batch' in vboptions. As detailed in the first post.

[Paul M]

Updated: This is now available for the 4.1.x series of vBulletin only.