Duplicate emails get sent from simplenews
vomc8one - January 3, 2007 - 19:26
Hi,
I have simplenews running on a drupal 4.7.4 site. We currently have about 3,800 people subscribed to some of our newsletters. I have double checked this list myself and found no duplicates. But when I send a newsletter to our list, I get the same newsletter about 5 times in my own gmail account (which is only subscribed *once*)...
This of course worries me because I don't want to have people cancel their subscriptions, thinking that we are spamming them by sending out the same thing multiple times. Since no dupes are present in the list I am not sure why this is happening...
Any help would be appreciated !
best
- Jochen
We have just experienced something similar
Just from a quick look, it seems that simplenews does not check if it is already running each time cron is run.
So, the first time you run cron everything is good and the mail gets sent normally, but if your mails haven't finished sending before the next cron run then another instance of the sending mail process is fired up and it will send a second copy of the mail (but only to users who have yet to recieve a mail). And so the process will continue - the users at the end of your list will recieve the email as many times as cron has run.
This is a bit of a pain (to put it lightly). The quick and dirty solution is to disable your cron job whilst sending the newsletters, hit cron.php manually to kick start the process, and then reenable your cron job when everything is finished ... will have a look and see if this is in the handbook, if not then i will create an entry for it now ...
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from Computerminds
This hurts
We have a very large mailing list too (about 8k). Do you know if this is going to be fixed anytime soon? I would hate to move to a "nonDrupal" mailer. I want to keep everything tidy and running from one system. Our subscribers, not to mention my superiors, are quite dissatisfied. I put myself on the receiving list and got 18 e-mails.
Solutions for 4.7.x and 5.0
See http://drupal.org/node/70995 for possible solution for 4.7.x
Drupal 5.0 has fixed this problem by using semiphores (in the same code as article above) to prevent multiple runs of cron.php
Seems that Drupal 5 might NOT have fixed this problem
I have a simplenews newsletter to which about 500 people are subscribed, and I have been getting complaints of people receiving up to four different copies.
Please note: I have to use poormanscron.
My impression is that the problem may have started only _after_ my provider switched from php 4 to php 5, but I have no way of verifying this.
Is anyone else seeing this?
Having the same problemen
On Drupal 5.3. First mailing to 5000 subscribers. Several complaints of multiple receptions.