Missing the most basic feature

  • While the plugin is very nice and has a pretty good UI, it is missing the most basic feature that any email plugin should have – a ‘send now’ feature.

    This means that the plugin won’t work for anyone having issues with their cron system. Having problems with the cron system is fairly common. In the UK, anyone using Heart Internet as a hosting provider (which serves most of the UK) will have issues with cron by default. Meaning almost an entire country cannot properly use the plugin.

    I have an issue with the cron system on my website. Mine doesn’t seem to be generic but might be due to a corrupted wp-cron.php file.

    Why isn’t there a simple ‘send now’ option for newsletters?

    Many email plugins support this feature. Most annoyingly of all, Newsletter supports this feature but only for testing the template service email.

    This means that my full newsletters never send, but the template email sends instantly.

    It seems that when one tries to ‘send now’ what Newsletter actually does is put the task on the cron system to be executed within five minutes, meaning if the cron system fails it’s impossible to send newsletters out.

    There is a ‘trigger’ button when the scheduled task fails, but this only works for newsletters, and not for testing emails. On my install, it seems only to work intermittently, or sometimes hours late – again, issues with cron most likely.

    Looks like I’ll just have to go for another simpler plugin.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Stefano Lissa

    (@satollo)

    Hi, about the “send now”, it means this: if you have 3000 email they should be sent in a shot. It means if your mailing system is low, for example 1 email per second, it will take little less than one hour.

    But a provider which blocks the cron, won’t let you run a PHP process for more than 30 seconds. Hence the process is killed after the first 30 emails.

    The test email are sent IMMEDIATELY, they do not rely on the cron. If you don’t receive test emails, it means your provider is dropping them. It’s common there are provider allowing 100 emails per day and no more than 1 email per minute, for example.
    In other cases, the provider has a so limited mailing system, that emails shows up after hours cause they are enqueued with thousands of others or the system is continuously going down.

    Connecting the blog with a test SMTP (see Mailtrap for example) will show you that test email are actually sent immediately. Or with an SMTP plugin with an email muting and local logging option.

    Of course they are cheap providers and cannot be used with a mail marketing solution like our plugin. It’s no really different than have a 1,000,000 page views site hosted on a 20$/year hosting: it doesn’t work.

    Finally, yes the cron problem is a real problem for two reasons. First, PHP is not an application container (other “languages” can have their internal cron) and the cron must be triggered by other means. Second, there are provider which blocks the cron exactly because they don’t want people doing think like mail marketing.

    Personally I wouldn’t use a provider which blocks the cron, but it strictly depends on what one needs to do with his blog, which kind of business he’s developing.

    So, we cannot add a “send now”, it will cause more problems than solved.

    Thank you, Stefano.

    I’ve used RSMail for a fair while on my Joomla sites. My site hoster sets limits of the number of emails sent *per hour*. In RSMail, I set the number of outgoing emails value then set the CRON script to fire hourly.

    I don’t see that sort of functionality in the Newsletter plugin for WordPress. Maybe one for the wishlist? ??

    Plugin Author Stefano Lissa

    (@satollo)

    Sorry, but that is not clear to me. In Newsletter you can set the emails per hour and setup a cron which fires every five minutes. That makes the sending process even more secure and smooth that have a big block of emails sent once per hour.

    If you want change the delivery engine behavior, you can even set the processing interval from 300 seconds (5 minutes) to 3600 seconds (1 hour).

    BUT please, this is a support question, move the discussion to the support forum, not here.

    Thank you, Stefano.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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