WP Mailer sends multiple emails for each post

Same here. When I check the send status, it appears to be stuck halfway through the job — now 18+ hours later. I’ve already received 5 copies of the same email at various intervals, the 5th one being about 2 hours ago (16 hours after the post was published).

I found a hacky way of solving this, although it would be nice to have this method confirmed with the devs, cause WP Mailer on my site has one other strange behaviour that might be due to my hack.

The hack: Edited wp-mailer/mailer/send.php, by adding a comment before the line with “$start = 0”, i.e.:

function wpm_send_job($job) {

if (is_int($job)) $job = wpm_get_job($job);
$post = get_post($job->job_post_id);
if ($post->post_status != ‘publish’) return;

$buffer = get_option(‘wpm_batchsize’);
$pause = get_option(‘wpm_batchpause’);
$start = $job->job_sent?$job->job_sent:0;
// $start = 0;
$finish = wpm_get_subscriber_count();
…

Thanks so much for sharing. I want to try this on my site, but first can you share the other behavior you mentioned? I want to be sure the secondary issue isn’t worse than the first for the site I’m developing.

But of course, silly of me not to write in the first case!

Since the hosts of my domain have an upper limit to the number of emails I can send every hour of 250, I use the options given with WP Mailer to stop and wait for 3600 seconds for every 200’th email sent. This functionality does not seem to work, as it continues to send emails without stopping at 200, 400, and so on…

I seem to be OK with batching. My total number of subscribers is about 80. I tried modifying the batch settings when the job seemed to be get stuck (resulting in multiple emails for some, none for others) but it didn’t help.

I’ll try it soon and let you know. The only thing that makes troubleshooting difficult for me is that I don’t have access to the email server so I can’t monitor handoff and delivery. I couldn’t find any local logging either.

vegardlr, I have a job running now. It looks like it’s stuck halfway through the job again, but I’m keeping an eye on it and will let you know what happens.

By any chance, do you know if it’s possible for a double opt-in configuration? I noticed the number of subscribers increased and they all looked like bogus accounts so I deleted them.

vegardlr, the job I wrote about in my previous reply took about 4 hours for ~80 recipients. I changed the batch settings so that there will be only 1 batch, and after a post yesterday, the batch completed in about 1 minute. We have another post going out today, and I’l looking forward to similar results. No multiple emails since I tried your workaround.

Thanks again for sharing!

alannamc, sorry for not getting back top you sooner, super busy days at work! Good to hear you got progress without batching. I am, however, dependent on batching and will look into these issues again later when I have the time. Still hoping the devs of WP Mailer finds this and give their view!

Don’t know if it helps, but I found this in the readme. I filed a bug report via the plugin the same day I found your post in this forum, but I haven’t heard back either.

If your posts queue up for a long time on the campaigns page then you need to ensure that your WordPress cron is running correctly.

**Security and bug-fixes are our highest priority, if you come across any issues then please go to the credits section within the plugin and send us a message.**

As I mentioned, I’m a contractor with limited access to the back end and no access to email so I’m a bit handicapped in my troubleshooting abilities. If issues continue, I may contact the hosting company to see if they can see anything useful on their side.

Thank you for your help with this vegardlr. I have received your emails and are waiting to be dealt with but my company has been a priority.

There are quite a few bugs at the moment regarding the wp-cron and sending of emails, the plugin is working perfect on one of my cPanel/CloudLinux server but I need to take a step back and rethink how emails are sent as some hosting providers are stopping/capping the script/emails from being sent. What I have found so far:

– Some hosting providers are killing the sending script after 30+ seconds as php files “shouldnt” have any reason to run more than 30 seconds.
– Some hosting providers are detecting too many emails are being sent in a short period of time and blocking the send.
Some hosting providers will not allow the wp-cron to run at all and needs to be setup manually which beginners will not know how to do.
– Some hosting providers will not let my send script run at all because it tries to override server settings such as set_time_limit()

Nice to hear from you, Richard Leishman. I see you have enough to ponder upon. I will await further input from you or other users. I have som ideas to how I can test the scripts behaviour on our web serveres, but will have to let it wait until later.