CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi there,

I'll start out with the following (to make things efficient)

• I am running the latest D7 with civiCRM 4.2.4
• I have read several (and maybe all of the) wiki entries and articles about setting up civiMail and I'm pretty sure I've got everything set up correctly within civiCRM
• I have set up my Scheduled Jobs appropriately: Send Scheduled Mailings (Always), Fetch Bounces (Always), Process Inbound Emails (Always)
• I've set up my civiMail -> Mailer Settings: Mailer Throttle Time = 150000, Mailer Job Size: 5000, everything else is default.
• I'm using mail() in Outbound Mail settings and have not received any errors when testing.
• I have a Default email account used for bounce processing return@example.com using the settings described in the wki instructions
• My email processor will not allow for dynamic emails like return+r.80.1467.20d9bc4caacdc096@example.com so I have set return@example.com as a catchall account as described in the instructions
• I have enabled Track replies using VERP in Reply-To header in CiviMail Component Settings
• I have set up a cron job that runs every 30 minutes and it does run successfully

So, with all that said, here's the issues:

• When I schedule an email to go out, it send out the first 10 and sits in running status. I suppose if I let it continue running cron jobs it would complete the run but I'm impatient and instead I've used http://www.example.com/civicrm/mailing/queue?reset=1&name=name&pass=password&key=my_key to get it over the hump... That works. Should I be running Cron every minute or something? I'm not sure what is limiting it to 10 messages. I made my changes to Throttle and Job Size in the hopes to improve that but it appears that it hasn't made a difference.
  
  
• When bounce processing is run, it checks for bounces and return messages. As far as I can see it is working as expected (reporting bounces and reporting/redirecting replies) however I receive an error if I run the job manually and I receive an emailed error when it runs from cron. The most recent message I have received is:
  
  Failed Processing: Re: SUBJECT_OF_MAILING, Action: r, Job ID: 80, Queue ID: 1467, Hash: 20d9bc4caacdc096. Reason: Queue event could not be found.
  
  The List of log entries for: Fetch Bounces always reports success and although I have a record of 25 or so bounces it always shows 0 Bounces.
  
  
• My List of log entries for: Process Inbound Emails always shows Failure... I'm not sure why, what it is doing or whether I shouldn't be scheduling it to run. The Full Message is:
  
  Finished execution of Process Inbound Emails with result: Failure, Error message: Process Activities failed
  

I think those are the only concerns I have with my setup but I'm working on several similar installations and civiMail is pretty fantastic so I want to work out the kinks.

Thanks,
Andrew

any idea why u'll are not using 4.2.7 or 4.2.8?

quite a few fixes to the code since 4.2.4 and my memory recalls some stuff in the activity things

awasson: do u also get 10 mail issue when throttle time is down to 0?

lobo

any idea why u'll are not using 4.2.7 or 4.2.8?

quite a few fixes to the code since 4.2.4 and my memory recalls some stuff in the activity things

awasson: do u also get 10 mail issue when throttle time is down to 0?

lobo

I'll be updating probably over the weekend and yes with the default settings I was only getting 10 emails out and then it went into running. I'll see if things change on the next run. kharding indicated that this happens but by the time cron runs again all has been sent.

Are there any best practices regarding how often to run cron?

Thanks,
Andrew

Thanks Lobo,

I think we're probably fine with this particular organization because we're sending only ~1000 users once or twice a week. I think I'll up the cron to every 10 minutes just to be safe though.

Andrew

Thanks for the info kharding. I'll keep an eye on this.

I don't think I have any option other than using my catchall for bounce processing because my email server doesn't recognize variations on an email address like return+r.80.1467.20d9bc4caacdc096@example.com. It will bounce that right back so I've set return@example.com as a catchall and it seems to be working fine.

NOTE: I do recall another issue that I wanted to include in my initial posting and that is when I send out a mailing with response tracking and someone send a response, I receive the response but the html from the original mailer is garbled and the message is prefixed with the following text:

This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.

I'm not sure if that is a result of my email client or something else that caused that.

I took a quick look at the code and i dont think you can safely use the same email account to process bounces and "activities"

lobo

I took a quick look at the code and i dont think you can safely use the same email account to process bounces and "activities"

lobo

Good to know. I'm going to see if I can add this to the documentation. I had thought that this might be the case.

I think that the suggested use-mode was an email address you could BCC or "bounce" messages at, so that there's a sort of filter on things.  Perhaps.