Cleaning Up Database Tables After Bot Attack

Hello there @sitebuilder14 ,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

I’m taking a look at the screenshot you sent over and I can see the database tables that you speak about.

These tables serve different purposes for example, we use the?mailpoet_scheduled_task_subscribers?table to track the users we send newsletters to. That is the main purpose of this table. When creating a newsletter, we insert a row for each subscriber there. When the sending for this subscriber is done, we mark the row as processed. After that, we use the data in this table for the Inactive subscriber’s feature. When we are looking to see if a subscriber is inactive, we look at this table. So if you’re not using the Inactive subscribers feature, you can delete any older processed data.

If you are using the feature, you should keep the data for the period you set up here in MailPoet settings:

Normally neither the size of the table nor the number of tables shouldn’t be an issue unless your hosting company enforces a relatively low DB size limit.
In this case, you can either request an increase or eliminate some of the old emails.

Some queries we can suggest in case you want to delete old data:

DELETE FROM wp_mailpoet_sending_queues where sent_at < '2021-01-01';DELETE FROM wp_mailpoet_scheduled_task_subscribers where created_at < '2021-01-01';DELETE FROM wp_mailpoet_statistics_opens where created_at < '2021-01-01';DELETE FROM wp_mailpoet_statistics_clicks where created_at < '2021-01-01';

Ensure to change the desired date and your database prefix before running the query.

Note: We recommend making a backup of the?tables before deleting anything.

If MailPoet slows down your site independently from database tables, we recommend setting up server-side cron:?Setting the Server Side Cron (Linux Cron).

This should be helpful!

Hi,

Thank you for your response.

I would like to know if it’s safe to delete the following tables. The website was active for a while, but I haven’t really started the project yet, and I don’t have any real subscribers. Can I reset the plugin by deleting these tables without breaking the site or the plugin? Will these tables regenerate when new subscribers sign up?

wp_mailpoet_scheduled_task_subscribers
wp_mailpoet_subscriber_segment
wp_mailpoet_scheduled_tasks
wp_mailpoet_log

I’m not familiar with running queries, so it would be easier for me to use a database cleaner plugin to delete these tables. Would that work?

Kind regards,

Hello again @sitebuilder14 ,

Since you want to reset the plugin, you can use the reinstall from scratch button located at MailPoet > Settings > Advanced > Reinstall from scratch

Link to screenshot: https://d.pr/i/1f8857

Of course, feel free to reach out to us if you need any more help or have other questions and we’d be happy to help.