SMF 2.0.15 mail query - scheduled task

[North East Man]

Having just had my forum blocked by my hosting company - one of the inexperienced admin ticked a box to "announce" an event they had created which resulted in a mass email message going out to all members (1300).  Given my host imposed limit of 250 emails per hour, they pulled the plug this morning.

Although I had enabled the mail queue and set the limit per minute, that setting had been overridden to a higher number than the 250 per hour.

Having looked into this further, and seen posts in this forum about email sending being a scheduled task, I cannot see anywhere in my scheduled task list that email sending has an entry.  Does this mean that my emails are just being sent out as and when requested?  I do have mail queue enabled.

[Looking]

I cannot say for sure about the Email issue, but one thing is for sure... you need a better host.

[GigaWatt]

I cannot say for sure about the Email issue, but one thing is for sure... you need a better host.

Agreed. Taking the site offline doesn't solve anything. They could just limit the number of emails sent to 250 per hour on the server, drop the rest and inform you of your action and that that is not allowed in your hosting plan.

On my account, the limit was 50 per hour. Dropped a request to the host asking politely to up the limit a bit (even though that was not included in my hosting plan), tech support bumped it to 100 .

Getting back to the problem at hand. Have you checked your mail cue (Admin --> Maintenance --> Mail --> Browse Queue)?

[North East Man]

The whole thing was a shambles - for each outgoing message they triggered an email message back to the webmaster email address to say that we had exceeded our limit and that the message was delayed and would be resent so I was the recipient of hundreds of "spam" messages.  This happened in the evening at 9pm and at 9am next morning they modified my .htaccess to include a deny all setting.  After a half hour "chat" with support they lifted the ban.  I have since modified my topic pages to remove the Announce topic tick box.

Anyway, back to the question.  Every time I check the mail queue it shows as empty.  I currently have my mail settings as queue enabled, max emails per minute 4, max emails per page load 5, php mail sending as default.

Given, we have quite a lot of emails going out (mention mod, personal messaging, notifications all triggering an email) I would have expected to occasionally see something in the queue.

I don't want to see the contents of outgoing emails, but is there not some form of metric or log that I can see that says how many emails have been sent.  I will ask my host the same question.  I just want to be able to monitor the email output so if I see it rising I can do something about it.

Which brings me back to my original question - are my mails being sent on an immediate basis as I don't seem to have a scheduled task for mail sending.

[Illori]

there is no scheduled task related to the mail queue.

[GigaWatt]

Anyway, back to the question.  Every time I check the mail queue it shows as empty.  I currently have my mail settings as queue enabled, max emails per minute 4, max emails per page load 5, php mail sending as default.

I would drop the max emails per minute to 1 and max emails per page load to 1 too. See if that triggers the mail cue .

[North East Man]

Thanks GigaWatt,

That's what I did in the end and it showed that the mail queue was working so that set my mind at rest, but it did raise another problem which was that the scheduled task for sending out the daily notification summaries is not working.  I know it was working when I set the forum up 4 weeks ago because that is one of the things my members like.  I had seen a few moans on the site about people not getting them, but just put it down to them not looking in spam folders.  So I signed up myself to receive a board notification, set the time and waited.  The time came and went, I watched the queue - nothing.  Yesterday afternoon I did a manual "Run now" of the task.  It worked - filled up the queue with 100 emails.

Set the time to run again this morning, watched the mail queue- nothing!  Tried the manual Run Now, still nothing.  After 5 presses of the Run Now, the task has finally triggered.

So my original query is resolved, but unless anyone has a quick resolution as to what is going on with the notification email, i'll Raise a new topic asking for help on that issue.

Many thanks

[GigaWatt]

Hmmm... that is odd... this might be a server side issue.

If you have cPanel access to your hosting account, check your Track Delivery log in the Email section, see if anything weird is going on there, like emails not delivering from the server side at the time the daily notification scheduled task is triggered (or at least part of them, since the max emails per minute is now set to 1).