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Change priority on Newsletters

Started by jdgretz, August 31, 2020, 11:07:58 PM

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jdgretz

I'm having problems with outbound email - SMF is not sending to all the users who have opted to be notified of new postings.  In the meantime, we have been using Announce Topics which goes out as a Newsletter.  Unfortunately the priority is set to LOW.  Where is the file to change to set that to Normal - just like email.  That should send the Announcements out at the default rate of 30 per minute.

Thanks,

jdg

ps - if you have any ideas on why it is not sending out emails correctly, I'm open to suggestions

Arantor

Changing the priority is a bad idea.

Firstly, it will block the entire queue of other messages, secondly it will try to send them out all in one go rather than over time, causing you to likely get blocked as a spammer depending on how many you're sending.

So, one assumes the mail queue is on... are things leaving the queue?

jdgretz

#2
Our forum is a bit different - it's for the Patriot Guard Riders in Southern California and is only used to post missions and send out notifications to our members so that they can show up for the funerals.  There is a small group of seven people who are allowed to post to the forum, which is supposed to generate an outbound message.  Unfortunately, the mail notification is only sending about fifteen emails, not the 1700 it should be sending.

Our current hosting company has been running a shared  hosting service, but is shutting down her servers (I think we are the only one still operational).  She knew the problem and was unable to solve the email issue so allowed us to dump 1700 messages several times a day (if necessary). I doubt we will have that capability with our new hosting service (GoDaddy) or email provider (Microsoft Office 365).

Stuff in Low Priority goes out very slowly - too slow for our purposes, so we override the setting and tell SMF to send all now.   If we could get either the email to work properly (I'm at an impasse and may be looking for paid support to resolve this) or get Newsletters to go out at email speeds, then we would be happy.  The preference is email working correctly, but having Newsletters going our at the email rate works for us as well.

Oh, and testmail.php works.  But that doesn't really help since SMF is not sending out to the whole group who have subscribed to notifications.

Does that make sense?

jdg

Arantor

Here's the thing, you're making an assumption that simply isn't true.

You're assuming that sending newsletters of 'higher priority' means they will go out of the queue quicker. Not true. Things set to higher priority never go to the queue in the first place, so they are sent immediately. This also means they won't adhere to the sending limits you've set. Also don't forget that 1700 emails at 30 per minute is still basically an hour.

The secondary problem is that what you've described also probably doesn't have enough traffic to actually drain the queue - the queue only sends when people actually visit the site. That's probably part of the problem; if it can only send x emails per page load, someone has to keep visiting to actually generate the page views to actually make that work.

You could as a short term solution just turn the email queue off so *everything* has to go immediately, but that still won't work for the limits that you've got (and you *definitely* won't have those limits on GoDaddy)

Honestly though it sounds to me that what you want is actually more like a mailing list rather than a forum. Maybe something on Facebook or Google Groups. Or even a blog.

jdgretz

We thought of that in the past and given our volume of missions, it doesn't work, and of course we want people not on our email list to see what's going on.

In your copious spare time, take a look at https://www.socalpgr.org/pgr/ (or start off at https://www.socalpgr.org for the main page which links the forum using SoCal Missions) to see what we are doing.

I don't remember at which point email quit working as designed, but the lady hosting the website could never figure it out.  Since she allowed us to dump the queue, it wasn't a big deal.  Now it is.

If I look at the email queue, it shows regular notifications with a priority or Normal.  These go out from the queue quickly (I don't know at what rate, but fast enough for our purposes) and don't overload the email host.  We can work with the hosting provider or MS for the volume we send.

Just so I understand what you are saying -


  • We have 1700 people sign up for notifications when a new message is posted to a board they are watching by clicking the Notify button.

  • We post a new mission (New message on the board)

  • Notification goes out to those 1700 users via an email with Normal priority in the Mail Queue

What determines how fast those emails are actually sent?


  • We post a new message an tell SMF to Announce the message
  • Notification goes out to 1700 users via an email with Low priority in the Mail Queue

What determines how fast those emails are actually sent?

I know there is a significant delay in sending the Low priority  - sometimes hours before they are sent.

Is there an alternate way to get those Announcements to send faster?

jdg <-- not trying to beat a dead horse, just looking to resolve the send mail problem (using php for mail BTW)

Arantor

So a quick glance at your forum tells me what I suspected: a low volume of people actually visiting. The fact you're 5 versions behind main SMF is another matter but not related to this; there are no fixes to the email sending that I can think of between 2.0.12 and 2.0.17.

Let's go back real quick to the original point: you have 1700 emails to send out. At 30 a minute, best case: this is just under an hour to send.

And that's under ideal circumstances of actual human visitors visiting at least once every minute (and ideally, 2-3 or more people per minute) for that hour. And the whole point of priority is that any other incidental emails generated will be sent ahead of those. (Hence low priority.)

What ultimately determines how fast they are sent? How many people actively come visit your site. You need actual people visiting the site for emails to be sent if you are using the queue, because that's the way the queue is actually examined.

jdgretz

Ah, got it. (OK, it took a while, but I can be taught!)

The new installation is on 2.0.17.  Same problems there.  So it's visits to the site that cause the queue to flush on it's own.  *sigh*

Any idea why SMF would not picking up all the email addresses and sending mail to those who have requested notification?  Any place to check that (other than looking at each profile to ensure they have requested notifications?) .  Until the problem arose, hundreds of our members were getting the notices.  When the problem hit (wish I knew which update did it to us) only about 20 folks now get the notices, everyone else relies on the Announcement.

Thanks again.

I'll quit bugging you for a while as I have to fix a customer printer issue now.

jdg

m4z

Arantor, would a cronjob work on 2.0.x? (I'm using one on 2.1 RC2.)
"Faith is what you have in things that don't exist."
--Homer Simpson

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Arantor

Quote from: m4z on September 03, 2020, 10:10:08 AM
Arantor, would a cronjob work on 2.0.x? (I'm using one on 2.1 RC2.)

Not the same way, 2.1 was specifically tooled up better about this. It is possible to do - the site does it - but I don't think the supporting file was ever released that does the work.

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