I used SimpleNews to try to distribute a HTML Newsletter to about 600 subscribers today. The result was many blank e-mails being sent along with some properly formatted emails. It looks like most were blank. many people report recieving a blank e-mail. I also recieved one as I had multiple e-mail addresses in the list to monitor the progress. The only content was the unsubscribe message at the bottom.

Any ideas why this would happen? Any sugggestions on how to debug this problem. The module seems to work really, really well otherwise, and I thank you for the code.

Comments

DriesK’s picture

DriesK commented

This question has been asked today on the support mailing list as well, and it has been mentioned in this issue: http://drupal.org/node/5380.

Did you in any way restrict access to the newsletters for the 'anonymous' role? As the above issue explains, cron runs as anonymous, and this may cause your problem. There is a patch pending to solve this, please try the patch and add a comment in that issue if permissions are the cause of this behaviour in your case.

abhishekn’s picture

abhishekn commented

Even after assigning all the access controls over newsletter to the anonymous as well authenticated role, the mails recived by the recepiants are blank mails.While sending to the test email id would always work fine...

DriesK’s picture

DriesK commented

1. What type of newsletter are you trying to send (plain/html)
2. Which input filter are you using (filtered html/full html/php code)
3. Do you have any access-related module installed (node privacy byrole, taxonomy access control, ...)

Evan Leeson’s picture

Evan Leeson commented

Her's my story, though it is a bit hazy now since time has passed. I have node privacy by role enabled, though I don;t know why. I think I was going to use it for something them did't but forgort to disable it. Seems like this is a bit of a pill from some of the discussion...

I was using full html input.

I don't know if I had access restricted in anyway, but that doesn't seem relevant to me since many properly formatted e-mails were sent and received by users who are anonymous on the system. Unless it was the case that the module sent the first 150 or so and cron took over after that. I don't remeber what my max send time setting was.

I broke my 600 recipients down into four newsletter lists of relatively equal size and sent a newsletter to each group. I initiated all four aropun d the same time (within minutes of each other). It looked like the system got through the first group of abut 150 and then at some point during processing of the second the problem happened. I killed all four e-mails before any more blanks could be sent. In one case a recipient recieved 24 blank e-mails with just the unbsubscribe message within an hour.

I tested the module using about a hundred dummy addresses and it worked fine with that N of recipients. All messages were recived and properly formatted.

Looking at the permissions my instinct would have been to have admin access only for all settings except view links in block.

In case it is relevant, my isp support has set a cron job to run the cron.php with this:

59 * * * * wget -O - -q http://myhost.com/cron.php

evan

caguldi’s picture

caguldi commented

I too experienced this. In addition to the blank e-mails, extra copies of non-blank emails were sent. We only succeeded in turning it off by closing the email account that was sending the emails.

It appears to me to be related to our using poormanscron. The maximum send time in simplenews was 2 seconds. Poormanscron was set to run once an hour. A new burst of blank emails was going out each time poormanscron ran. Someone tried to disable poormanscron by blanking out the time interval between runs. Unfortunately, this caused poormanscron to start every time anyone accessed the site. That was when duplicate non-blank as well as blank emails were generated. for two email addresses I monitored, there were 1 each blank emails during the hourly cron runs, followed by 14 non-blank and 13 blank emails for one address and 20 non-blank and 23 blank emails for the other address, before the sending account was closed. The 27 emails for one address all had the same time stamp as one another. The 43 emails for the other address all had a different time stamp from the 27, but the same time stamp as one another.

kae’s picture

kae commented

lectric, does it work if you disable node privacy by role? which cron are you using?

sutharsan’s picture

sutharsan commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

If support is still needed, please re-open this issue.