So we need to spread out a list over several days, with sends only from 8 a.m. to 4 pm until the list is exhausted.
As most of our outbound emails complete in a day what I’ve been doing when the list requres more days is simply manually stop the run and start it up again the next day.
But I feel there must be another way to do this using a cron job.
For each day I want that “batch” to be spread evenly over the time period. Because our emails aren’t that urgent several minutes between them is okay. I can do all the forgoing in a one-shot-day, but could use some advice on longer.
Thanks!
You could do this by modifying your batch period in the config file… say set it to 10 emails an hour. This would set your rate/hour. If you want the emails spread out over the hour… put a delay between emails for 5 minutes, that way it’s spreading the 10 emails over the hour, spaced by 5 minutes between them.
Then, configure your cron job to start at 8am, and run every 15 minutes, until 4:45pm, on Mondays-Fridays. (or, whatever suits your purpose)
Thank you Dan. Understand, but I’ve never been able to wrap my head around why you need to keep activating the cron job say in the example, for every 15 minutes. Why can’t you just kick it off once, with it just ending at 4:45 pm (example given)?
The cron job sends for a certain length of time (set by the batch period). if you set the batch period to 0, then the sending will run until all the emails are sent. (you can’t stop the sending once it starts). You want to run it for a shorter time, and if the sending terminates for some reason (out of memory, something goes wrong, etc), it won’t start again until the cron job checks.
setting the cron to run at shorter intervals basically allows the system to start sending again sooner. If it’s already sending, the cron job does NOT start a second sending process.
Ah ok! That was the part I was concerned about - that it would start another session. That’s very useful to know and I would suggest it get put into the phplist tech notes, unless I’m the only one who was losing sleep over it.