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?

[Logician]

Very nice idea! Thanks for sharing!

[Man1c M0g]

Does this hack allow you to send HTML-based Newsletters, and can it send to members of a secondary usergroup? Because those abilities would be ULTRA useful!

[silurius]

Originally Posted by Man1c M0g

Does this hack allow you to send HTML-based Newsletters, and can it send to members of a secondary usergroup? Because those abilities would be ULTRA useful!

It's just a guess but I think this extension does not actually alter email format in any way, and focuses exclusively on send-related functionality.

Here's another mod that might do some of what you're after.

[Jafo232]

Well, according to Perlmonks, there is a wrapper with Qmail that emulates sendmail:

http://www.perlmonks.com/?node_id=224380

Qmail comes with a wrapper (in /var/qmail/bin/sendmail, or in the bin directory of wherever you installed Qmail) that emulates sendmail nicely.

My guess is that all you do is enter /var/qmail/bin/sendmail as your sendmail path and it should work.

[kadafi_alive]

Hi, this might be a newbie question but how do you find out if you have:

Perl (Some hosts call this CGI) w/ the DBI module (MySQL driver)

installed?

Thanks in advance

[Snake]

Thanks!

[tuanluu]

thanks for sharing

[tuanluu]

$path_to_sendmail = '/usr/lib/sendmail'; -------> for win 2003 what should I put?

"Upload the list.cgi file IN ASCII (NOT BINARY OR AUTO) mode somewhere on your server where it CANNOT be accessed by a browser or any other user except yourself." -------> you mean anywhere on my server or in forum root? for example c:\secure

[Jafo232]

Originally Posted by kadafi_alive

Hi, this might be a newbie question but how do you find out if you have:

Perl (Some hosts call this CGI) w/ the DBI module (MySQL driver)

installed?

Thanks in advance

Well, most hosts have Perl installed, but your host may be able to tell you. Generally Perl installations also have DBI installed, but you will know pretty quick when you run the Perl script because it will throw a visible error saying it cannot find the module.