From: Michael Sagaser ...@gmail.com>
Subject: [dadadev] Stale mailouts holding up other emails
Date: June 8th 2009

Greetings all!

Over the last few months, I have been getting more and more frustrated. I am at the end of my ability to solve problems and find a need to bring in some bigger guns, which is the purpose of this message.

I have a client that is using Dada Mail 3.0.2 for their church website. There are two lists. One is a prayer list, which is set as a discussion list and the other is an announcement list, which is set to allow emails only from selected people (authorized senders).

For the most part, everything is working fine, but a few months ago, I started having some huge issues with the cron jobs created to automatically check for new emails. The Dada Mail documentation page here provides a few options, but none of them work in the server environment (Hostmonster, a sister company of Blue Host). I have tried speaking with support about this and have not gotten very far with them. I read and researched online and came up with the following cron code that seems to work wonderfully:

/usr/bin/curl --get --data run=1 --get --data passcode='*****' -o "/path/to/.dada_files/.logs/.bridge_crons" www.domain.org/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/dada_bridge.pl > /dev/null 2>&1


I don't get errors with the above code, and emails tend to get sent out as expected. The cron is set to run every 15 minutes.

The frustration I am having now is related to mail outs going stale for no apparent reason. Dada Mail (the install I am running) is set to only handle 1 mail out at a time. This seems to be hard coded into the program, but might also be a limitation of the free version I am running (don't have the funds for the pro version, though I dream of getting it someday ...). Whatever the reason, this limitation is causing some problems inside Dada Mail and I don't know its origin.

Example:

There is a prayer request that gets sent to the list. Cron picks it up and starts to send. Sometime after it starts sending, the mail out goes stale and hangs. Another urgent request for prayer goes out about a recent potentially fatal accident, or time sensitive information about funeral arrangements goes out for a recent death. Cron checks and sees it, but because there is already and active, though stale mail out, the system skips the new email until the current one finishes. The problem is, the stale mail out stays that way for days until someone notices (like the pastor) and sends me an email saying there was an important message that didn't get out in time ...

I go back and log into the admin pages, see the stale mail out, restart/resend it, it goes through, and then I manually dada_bridge to find there are actually several emails waiting to be sent.

I have checked the logs and don't find anything except this line:

[Sat Jun  6 11:09:05 2009]    prayerwarriors    xx.xx.xx.xx    List Mailing Completed    subject:[Dada Mail Developers] Prayer Meeting, Mailing Started: 06/02/2009 13:00:12, Mailing Completed: 06/06/2009 11:09:05, Mailing Amount:56

I have got to get this fixed as quickly as possible. If anyone can help, that would be fanstastic!

~regards