Mass Mail/Newsletters Via Cronjob

For those of you who use the "Send Email to Users" function in the admin cp may have noticed it is less than efficient. This is really not the Vbulletin teams fault, it is just the fact that sending a lot of emails via PHP is like emptying lake with a bucket.

For administrators with a very large user base, sending email this way is not only very time consuming, but can be taxing on a servers resources.

With this extension, you can save your mass mailings or newsletters in a batch that can be sent at any time you wish, or on a schedule using a program like crontab.

You can even use a separate server to send the email if you wish.

Version 1.1 now supports the hack Send HTML via admin CP so you can batch mail HTML emails.



Requirements:

Perl (Some hosts call this CGI) w/ the DBI module (MySQL driver)
Net::SMTP module IF you plan on using SMTP (common Perl module)
Sendmail or SMTP
Access to crontab (for scheduled processing)
Telnet/SSH access to your server (for testing purposes only)

As for Telnet/SSH access, you will most likely need this unless you can schedule a cronjob via your servers admin GUI.


CHANGELOG:

01/05/2005: Added support for SMTP
01/05/2005: Modified code to include Vbulletin generated mail headers and encoding


Installation (detailed in readme file):

Install the product via your admin cp.

Open the list.cgi file and edit the database variables and upload to server IN ASCII MODE. Do not use Binary or Auto mode to upload list.cgi. You should upload this file in an area that is NOT accessible by a web browser.

Click Install

That is it. If you wish to use scheduled batches then you will have to set up a cronjob to execute the list.cgi file.

You can execute the list.cgi file any time you wish on your server like so:

"perl list.cgi"



What does this do exactly?:

In a nutshell, when you enter a message into the mass mail feature of Vbulletin, it saves the message details to a new table created by the product (massmail). When list.cgi is executed, it will go through this table and email everyone in the table and delete their entry after the mail is sent.



Usage:

The only thing you should do differently is set the "Emails to send at once" value to at least the amount of users you have registered. It defaults at 500 but the whole point of this hack is to eliminate having to send email in blocks and wait for the process to finish. Just set it to a real high number.



To Do:

For those Windows servers, I suppose the Send_Mail routine could use SMTP. This is not hard to do I just never use Windows servers so what's the point?

[NxTek]

I'm sending out about 5300 each month with no problem. I was under the impression this mod would send out the monthly reminder without me manually doing it.

[Jafo232]

Your impressions were wrong.

[NxTek]

Yes I guess so

[NxTek]

When trying to uninstall -

Database error in vBulletin 3.5.2:

Invalid SQL:
DROP massmail;

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'massmail' at line 1 Error Number : 1064
Date : Thursday, February 2nd 2006 @ 08:21:39 AM
Script : http://www.xxxx.com/forums/admincp/plugin.php
Referrer : http://www.xxxx.com/forums/admincp/p...s-Mail-Cron&s=

[lisquid]

My host limits me to 600 emails an hour do you think you could give us the option to send the emails in batch ammounts every [integer of time we input beetween batches here] until complete?

[UK Jimbo]

I like the sound of this hack, it would be really nice to get it to have it look at load averages and only proceed with the next block if the load on the server is below a given amount. I'll see if I can add this feature in

[oliwood]

Originally Posted by ChurchMedia

Just FYI, I used this to try to send out 28,000 newsletters. It killed my server and MySQL is dead and won't restart. When it was working it would send out 5-10 emails to the same person every once and a while. My site is down now. I'm not sure what caused it exactly, but I'll have to stick to my other mail program.

exactly the same for me... is there a bugfix ofr have i to remove this nice hack?

The cronjob runs once a day at 1 a.m. but also the Mails were send 10 times to poeple and the my server crachs after half an hour.

Would it help to add a sleep 1 after the removing of the MySQL entry?

[dutchbb]

Wow I really need this, is there a 3.6 release planned please?

[Joep11]

Originally Posted by Triple_T

Wow I really need this, is there a 3.6 release planned please?

Curious about that too!

[grandeur_69]

i haven't read the whole post, so pardon if this is repeated, but doesn't vB have a batching option? or is this something different?