Notification Emails Problem

[Stanyy]

I have a serious problem with notifications. A few months ago I posted a thread here about notifications only getting to about 3% of my members. As someone suggested, I spoke to my host and they said they allow about 5000 emails per min. I currently have mine set to 3 per min.

For some reason, notification emails (and possibly birthday emails) only go to about 950 users. I have more than 45,000. I have tried everything I can, except a few minutes ago I noticed a lot of users don't have the Allow users to email me box checked and I concluded this is the culprit.

The problem is, there's no setting in Admin to change this value for all users even in Current theme > Member options  How do I do this from the database?. Thanks in advance.

[Arantor]

"Allow users to email me" is not related to notifications.

But consider, 3 per minute = 180 per hour = 4320 per day maximum = 10.5 days to send to everyone.

[Stanyy]

I know Arantor, I am just desperate, confused and out of options. I send out notification emails once in two weeks and they are basically forum announcements. I believe I have tried almost everything I can.

I tried changing mail type from PHP to SMTP... nothing
I tried sending the notifications via pm.... nothing
I even tried 1 per min and 0 per page load.... nothing
I have quadruple checked member options in admin.


The funny thing is, when I made the other post here then, I had a little above 20,000 members, and notification email recipients were same 950ish. Now that I have above 45K, the email recipients are still about that same amount, it never changed. It's doing my head in.

[Arantor]

Are you talking about notifications as in topic notifications or an announcement? The former is strictly opt-in, the latter isn't...

But 1 per minute would make the problem worse by dragging it out... 1 per minute = 60 per hour = 1440 per day = a month to send it out to everyone.

[Stanyy]

I'm talking about announcements. Topic notifications are working perfectly, although I don't really care much about it.
I am very close to insanity right now.

I have tried very high and very low settings. It turned out 60 per min only sent out the emails very fast.

[Stanyy]

I just tried sending out newsletters now. Same thing happened but I left out one little detail - I get a blank page everytime. After I click the 'send' button, it loads for a while then displays a blank page.

Has anyone tried sending newsletters to this many members?

[Arantor]

Um, we send it out to 300,000 people when we do a newsletter here and it works for us...

[Stanyy]

What happens after you click the send button? Whenever I send to my moderators (5) it loads a page that just keeps refreshing multiple times (more than 20 times) until a certain progess number gets to 100%

But when I try to send to everyone, I get a blank page.
I'm trying to explain everything in detail as much as I can. Do you have the slightest clue as to what may be causing this?

[Arantor]

* Arantor Beeblebrox the First is not an administrator here, has no idea what it does.

[Kindred]

by a "blank page" do you mean an ACTUAL blank page...  like the white screen of death?

If so, then your system should be generating an error.log file in your site or forum root which you can look at.
the WSOD is usually due to an error at the php level....

[Stanyy]

Um, we send it out to 300,000 people when we do a newsletter here and it works for us...

* Arantor Beeblebrox the First is not an administrator here, has no idea what it does.

Wtf?

[Stanyy]

by a "blank page" do you mean an ACTUAL blank page...  like the white screen of death?

If so, then your system should be generating an error.log file in your site or forum root which you can look at.
the WSOD is usually due to an error at the php level....

Yes, it's a completely white page. I'll check the error file and get back to you, thanks a lot.

[Arantor]

Why would I need to be an administrator here?

Basic security 101: only give the permissions required to someone to be able to do their job. Don't give them everything unless they actually need it.

I do not need FTP access to this site, nor do I need admin access to the forum; the lead dev has those powers, but that's because he's the *lead* dev. I'm not, and my primary responsibility is with Github and the code itself, not with anything else.

But I know that others here who do use the admin panel do not have the problem you are describing because I would have heard about it by now

[Kindred]

correct. between this site and other sites that I run with tens of thousands of users, we don't have any issues...   it cycles through the send routines (do note, it can take DAYS) but eventually sends to everyone.

I think the last announcement took 6 days to cycle through all users on this site.