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This modification has been withdrawn.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.

[arkueckelhan]

Originally Posted by Makaveli007

Yes the one towards the end is the one I thought. I tried it probably six times even using ctrl h to find and replace indentically with the install instructions, and tried using wordpad, notepad, and my webhosts file editor. Changing the admincp > email.php in the same manner (ctrl h) worked perfectly. I used this mod great on vb3 and had no trouble editing the files.

screenshot
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/7910/capturelvy.png

Ill give it a go again in the AM

Paul, I am having this EXACT same error. I am running vbulletin 4.1.7

I get no errors from editing the other files but funcitons.php gives me the syntax error every time. If I return it to before, the error goes away. I am literally opening the file, highlighting the to-be-changed code, and pasting over it with the new code, not editing a single other thing. Does the functions.php need a different chmod or something?


Thanks
(btw, I am installing this on vb4, your other mod for 3.8 worked great for me on another forum)

[Paul M]

Nothing special is required, nor can I actually see anything wrong with the linked image.

[arkueckelhan]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Nothing special is required, nor can I actually see anything wrong with the linked image.

The error is live on my site: http://www.battleforums.com/forums/forum.php

Message says:

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at [path]/includes/functions.php:1) in [path]/includes/facebook/facebook.php on line 37

I made no changes to line 1 of functions.php or touch the facebook.php file AT ALL. Followed your instructions to a T.

Please help me with a workaround.

Thank you

[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!

[arkueckelhan]

Originally Posted by Paul M

Delete the e-mails from the mailqueue table.

I need to cancel a mailing after I have started already. How do I clear the data from the mailqueue table?

admin cp> maintenance > repair/ optimize tables
is the closest I have found. Googling didn't yield much help. Could you please shoot me a quick rundown or a link to the information

[Paul M]

[sql]TRUNCATE MAILQUEUE[/sql]

[aboayoy]

when i changed function.php

the forum stop and this messege will be shown :

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at [path]/includes/functions.php:1) in [path]/includes/functions.php on line 3968

forum
4.1.4

[aboayoy]

please ,
i want the one for 4.1.4

[Paul M]

This is for any 4.1.x version.

vB Version: 4.1.x

[final kaoss]

Paul, ever think about upgrading the little txt document to a diff file?