Cron – Mass email – cron job

cron

in my project, i need to send emails to the registered members of the site once every month. For this, i have setup a cron job on cpanel and it is working fine.

Whats my doubt is that, tomorrow the number of users in the site will increase and there would be thousands of users. Then does the cron job work as usual ?

I want to know, whether the cron can handle the task of sending emails to thousands of users at a time.

Please help.

Best Answer

If you are sending messages out to multiple thousands of users on a regular basis a cron job technically should be able to do it, but is it right for you and your users?

A mailing list manager app (e.g. MailMan) might be more appropriate. It may be configured to send the messages in a way that is less likely to fall foul of spam filters, will help you manage who gets sent the messages, and should allow recipients to opt out. You can still set up a cron job to trigger the sending of the message on a scheduled basis - I believe that is a more sustainable way of sending bulk messages.

Related Solutions

Cron Job – How to Run a Cron Job Manually and Immediately

Here's what I did, and it seems to work in this situation. At least, it shows me an error, whereas running from the command line as the user doesn't show the error.

Step 1: I put this line temporarily in the user's crontab:

* * * * *   /usr/bin/env > /home/username/tmp/cron-env

then took it out once the file was written.

Step 2: Made myself a little run-as-cron bash script containing:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/env -i $(cat /home/username/tmp/cron-env) "$@"

So then, as the user in question, I was able to

run-as-cron /the/problematic/script --with arguments --and parameters

This solution could obviously be expanded to make use of sudo or such for more flexibility.

Hope this helps others.

Php – Cron Job Sending Bulk Emails at a time

If you think that multiple instances of your script may be running at the same time then use some form of locking mechanism. Put your wget in a script and wrap it in a flock command

2 * * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /tmp/myAppLock.lck /path/to/your/wgetscript

If the MailQueue.php script is on the same machine that you're running cron on then you don't need wget

2 * * * * /usr/bin/flock -n /tmp/myAppLock.lck /usr/bin/php /path/to/Utils/MailQueue.php

will probably be a better solution as it will work without your webserver.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cron Job – How to Run a Cron Job Manually and Immediately

Php – Cron Job Sending Bulk Emails at a time

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