In the past, I had a very bad experience coding a PHP script to send bulk e-mail. This time we needed a newsletter sending module for the drupal site to send around 55,000 newsletter emails.
For this I found the simplenews module on the drupal site that served the basic purpose of a newsletter sending application. As per our needs, I also installed the other modules/plugins like simplenews template, simplenews statistics and mime mail which enhanced the features of the simplenews module.
The modules, plugins and other requirements:
The simplenews module: This is the core module needed for the newsletter functionality
New Content type: Create a content type for the simplenews module to use
The simplenews template module: This was needed to add custom header and footer to content type created for simplenews on drupal so that we could send a particular webpage/node (special content type for simplenews) as the newsletter.
The statistics module: This was needed for reporting purposes. It gives the information about how many people clicked the links on the mail and viewed the email etc..
Mime mail: This module helps in sending HTML mails and is needed to be used with simplenews template.
The installation and configuration:
First I installed the simplenews module and then the simplenews template and statistics (no specific order needed) then the mime mail module to send out HTML format emails.
Created a content type for the simplenews module and setup the taxonomy and pathauto settings for the terms for the content type so that once a node or page is created the link for it is properly generated.
The installation of “mime mail css compressor†needed the DOM php plugin installed so I did a yum install on the php plugins on the linux server and it updated the needed plugins for installation of css compressor.
Once the installation of all the required modules were done. I configured the simplenews module. One of the most important settings was to setup the mail send process to be run using the CRON job, and to setup such that it send more messages per cron run that doesn’t let the cron timeout. The max number of messages per cron job that I could successfully send were 200. setting it to 500 failed the cron run due to timeout.
Our server was setup to run cronjobs every one hour. This was very unfavourable for the simplenews module to send 55,000 messages. It would take 275 hours to finish the job in this case. Therefore I did a little research and came across ELYSIA cron module which splits all the cron jobs in drupal and lets us setup different cron run timings for different modules.
I changed the crontab drupal maintenance period to * * * * * and then in the elysia cron module settings changed the schedule for the simplenews module to be run every 5 minutes (*/5 * * * *) . Now the simplenews module would take only 23 hours to finish sending all the messages. (Each cron run was taking on an average 5 minutes to complete hence the time was selected as 5 mins)
Now the send process of the mail takes its time to send all the messages without crashing the smtp server and without backfiring and sending multiple mails to same user. This is the solution to sending bulk newsletters without crashing anything.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me.
