CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I can't get CiviMail to send scheduled emails.

I can always send the test emails from 'http://<site>/civicrm/admin/setting/smtp?reset=1' so I presume those settings are correct (SMTP, port 25, no authentication).  I always get the obligatory "SMTP settings are correct.' message.

So I'm thinking the problem is with cron...

I putty in and 'crontab -e' brings up this entry:

• "48 * * * * php /var/www/html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php" (/var/www/html) is the hosting provider's structure; DNS points to this directory for all web requests.

So cron is running the script, but the email is not sending.  I understand I do not need to specify user/pass/key here because cron runs under the system account (true/false?).  There are two entries in my error log for this cron job:

• [18-May-2009 15:48:03] PHP Warning:  require_once(../civicrm.config.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php on line 44
• [18-May-2009 15:48:03] PHP Fatal error:  require_once(): Failed opening required '../civicrm.config.php' (include_path='.:/php/includes:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php/lib/php') in /var/www/html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php on line 44

so cron is triggering, but I may have a script problem...

I went back to line 44 in civimail.cronjob.php and changed the relative path "../civicrm.config.php" to the absolute path "/var/www/html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/civicrm.config.php," to no avail.  It doesn't give me the errors above, but i don't get the emails either. I changed it back...  CiviMail wouldn't ship with this big of a flaw, right?

So I tried manually forcing the send both with and without keys configured using both:

• http://<site>/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php?name=<name>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>
• http://<site>/civicrm/mailing/queue?reset=1

But nothing.  No error or the page or in a log, but no emails either.

Anything else i should try? Oh, pray ye, the gods of Lobo, hear our cries...

entering this in my browser (looks the same as yours) gives me a blank page but the mailing is transformed from scheduled to completed. When you say no e-mails - does is still say scheduled? Or does it say completed but the e-mails didn't work?

http://myDomain/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php?name=<name>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>

Sure enough,

• 56 * * * * wget 'http://<site>/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php?name=<name>&pass=<pass>&key=<key>'

Works like a champ!

So, is wget the best way to call this or would php be better?

Hey Eileen, I was just going to post that every time cron runs the following two jobs

wget 'http://domain.com/drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/civimail.cronjob.php?name=user&pass=password&key=longstring' > /dev/null 2>&1
wget 'http://domain.com/drupal/sites/all/modules/civicrm/bin/CiviMailProcessor.php?name=user&pass=password&key=longstring' > /dev/null 2>&1

I get a file created in /root directory called 'CiviMailProcessor.php?name=user&pass=password!&key=longstring.12'
Note the .p12 appended, this is an incrementing number for each time the job runs (happens for both jobs, file gets created)

I see you have some other options there on your wget, I tried wget -q (for quiet) but that doesn’t seem to stop the file getting output to /root directory either... quickly builds up to thousands of files...

Any tips on this one?

I just checked, and I am having the same problem as yogibear:  multiple files in root that look like the cronjob.  I took the cronjob out of crontab and still get them.  what gives?

Hey dustbin, I have other cron jobs outputting to /dev/null 2>&1 no problem without creating extraneous files like the civimail jobs above do, I couldn’t resolve it that way despite trying quite hard and so chose a rather messy option of another couple of cron jobs as follows:
(note Ken kindly posted some steps to resolve this situation here http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,8124.0.html but at that point in my implementation I was unable to mentally process (overloaded the suggestions he made so went with my simple one below, but thankyou Ken

*/2 * * * * find /root -type f -name "CiviMailProcessor.php*" -exec rm -f {} \; >> /dev/null 2>&1
*/2 * * * * find /root -type f -name "civimail.cronjob.php*" -exec rm -f {} \; >> /dev/null 2>&1

What this does is find all files starting with civimailprocessor.php and civimail.cronjob.php and deletes them. The tricky -exec rm option is so that if you have thousands of files in a directory it will delete them efficiently, a simple rm file command didn’t work well when there were lots of files (if I recall correctly).

Something must be odd with my setup though as it doesent seem like everyone has this issue.
Using VPS Centos 4.1 (Redhat)