First of all, I apologize for the fact that this issue pertains to a very old version of SimpleNews. I've been trying to get the client whose site this concerns to upgrade for a while now, but they're still on Drupal 4.7. Hopefully not for much longer...

Anyway, they've been using SimpleNews for quite a while with no problems -- until this last newsletter mailing, where it seems that some subscribers received the newsletter the day it was sent out, but a lot of others didn't get it until two weeks later!

I'm not really sure where to start in trying to troubleshoot this. I've looked through the logs area of the Drupal admin and didn't see anything unusual there. The list does have about 400 subscribers, and the SimpleNews settings say that 20 messages can be sent out per cron run if they can't all be sent within the initial send time. So the newsletters may have gone out in bunches, but they should have at least all gone out the same day! Cron runs once an hour on that site, so even if it hadn't sent any at all in the initial send, it shouldn't have taken more than 20 hours to get the whole lot out.

Has anyone ever run into anything like this? I'm not even sure how to tell if it's a SimpleNews/Drupal issue or an issue with their web host...

Comments

sutharsan’s picture

sutharsan commented
Status: Active » Fixed

A delay like this is very unlikely to be caused by simplenews.

To debug place a watchdog message in the code where the newsletter is send. This way you have evidence that the email has been delivered to php mail() function.

It is important to note that just because the mail was accepted for delivery, it does NOT mean the mail will actually reach the intended destination.

Source: http://nl2.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php

Please note that 4.7.x is currently unmaintained.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.