Campaign Stuck after sending 247 emails

ℹ️ Support
1

Hi there, I’m new to phpList and having difficulties sending out my first campaign.

Using phpList 3.4.9 on cPanel - with no command line access.

I have a small subscriber list of 1512. I worked through the “Send a campaign” options and processed the queue. This sent 247 emails fine and then I hit the sending limit of my hosting solution with an email message from the mail server daemon “Domain has exceeded the max emails per hour (249/200 (124%)) allowed. Message will be reattempted later.”

I’ve now edited config_extended.php to try and limit the sending rate like this:

define(‘MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE’, 180);
define(‘MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD’, 3600);
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’, 10);

The campaign is still sitting in the system and I’m trying to complete sending the remain emails. When I try to process the queue again I see:

Started
Processing has started,
One campaign to process.
Please leave this window open. phpList will process your queue until all messages have been sent. This may take a while
Report of processing will be sent by email
Processing campaign 13
Looking for subscribers
Found them: 1266 to process
Sending in batches of 1 emails

Which sits there in the web browser for hours with no change. If I go back and view the campaign I see:

processing
processing.png759×354 14.4 KB

This concerns me because of the Processed Total of 9,117 - it seems that every time I try to process the queue it creates more duplicate emails to send but doesn’t send them.

I’ve tried using the phpList.com mail processing service rather than just leaving a browser window open but it doesn’t seem to be able to connect.

I’ve also looked at cPanel Email > Track Delivery but the emails don’t seem to be even getting that far at this point.

Would I be better off to just suspend this campaign and start over?

Thanks for any suggestions!

2

Make your changes to sending in config.php NOT config_extended.php The latter is used to show you what options are available and is not used by default. To use extended, rename to config.php (saving the original as another name first)

3

Aha! As indeed I now see I should have read at the top of config.php… :slight_smile:

Thanks, I’ll move the to config.php and see what happens.

4

OK, so know I’m seeing “Could not instantiate mail function.” in the log. Which seems from "Could not instantiate mail function" error after a number of successful deliveries likely to be because it’s gone past the mail server limits.

I’m thinking that I could use:

define(‘PHPMAILERHOST’, ‘’);
$phpmailer_smtpuser = ‘smtpuser’;
$phpmailer_smtppassword = ‘smtppassword’;

Because the SMTP server seems to be working fine, it’s just using the PHP mail function that’s stuck at the moment.

5

Yes, with luck, changing to SMTP rather than phpMail should be better.
However, you may then run foul of being classed as spam, so make sure you have a go at setting up SPF and DKIM on your SMTP server.

Here’s a HowTo set up DKIM on my website which may help.

1 Like
6

Thanks! Seem to be getting somewhere now with the SMTP server specified.

Still not sure I’ve got the hang of the batch size variables:

define(‘MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE’, 150);
define(‘MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD’, 3600);
define(‘MAILQUEUE_THROTTLE’, 10);

I think should keep it to 150 emails sent an hour, but it’s still giving me results like “15 messages sent in 62.76 seconds (860 msgs/hr)” and seems to be getting through 200 in 15mins.