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Mailing Monitor

Mailing Monitor Plugin

The Mailing Monitor plugin is used to monitor the health of mass mailings as they go out. Since mass mailings take a potentially a long time to finish, this plugin can help monitor a mass mailing, but more importantly, can help in restarting a mailing that has been, "dropped".

Mass Mailings can also be monitored in Dada Mail's list control panel under, Mass Mailing - Monitor Your Mailings and done so in a much more interactive way, so the power of this plugin is when it's run as a cronjob, "behind the scenes". This also allows you to not have your list control panel open in a browser, until your mass mailing is finished.

Mass Mailings drop because a mass mailing process may need to run longer than is allowed by your hosting environment - especially if you are on a shared hosting environment with limited and shared resources.

Schedules

The Mailing Monitor plugin also checks the awaiting schedules for messages scheduled in the Send a Message and Send a Webpage screens. Setting up the cronjob is required to ensure these scheduled mailings go out!

Installation

This plugin can be installed during a Dada Mail install/upgrade, using the included installer that comes with Dada Mail. The below installation instructions go through how to install the plugin manually.

If you install the plugin using the Dada Mail installer, you will still have set the cronjob manually, which is covered below.

Change permissions of "mailing_monitor.cgi" to 755

The, mailing_monitor.cgi plugin will be located in your, dada/plugins diretory. Change the script to, 755

Configure your .dada_config file

Now, edit your .dada_config file, so that it shows the plugin in the left-hand menu, under the, Plugins heading:

First, see if the following lines are present in your .dada_config file:

 # start cut for list control panel menu
 =cut

 =cut
 # end cut for list control panel menu

If they are, remove them.

Then, find these lines:

 #                                      {
 #                                      -Title      => 'Mailing Monitor',
 #                                      -Title_URL  => $PLUGIN_URL."/mailing_monitor.cgi",
 #                                      -Function   => 'mailing_monitor',
 #                                      -Activated  => 0,
 #                                      },

Uncomment the lines, by taking off the, "#"'s:

                                        {
                                        -Title      => 'Mailing Monitor',
                                        -Title_URL  => $PLUGIN_URL."/mailing_monitor.cgi",
                                        -Function   => 'mailing_monitor',
                                        -Activated  => 0,
                                        },

Save your .dada_config file.

Setting the cronjob

Generally, setting the cronjob to have this plugin run automatically just means that you have to have a cronjob access a specific URL. The URL looks something like this:

 http://example.com/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/mailing_monitor.cgi?run=1&verbose=1

Where, http://example.com/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/mailing_monitor.cgi is the URL to your copy of this plugin.

A Best Guess at what the entire cronjob that's needed (using the, curl command to access the actual URL) to be set manually will appear in this plugin's list control panel under the fieldset labled, Manually Run Mailing Monitor in the textbox labeled, curl command example (for a cronjob):. It'll look something like this:

 /usr/bin/curl  -s --get --data run=1\;passcode=\;verbose=0  --url http://example.com/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/mailing_monitor.cgi

Where, http://example.com/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/mailing_monitor.cgi is the URL to this plugin. We suggest running this cronjob every 5 to 15 minutes. A complete cronjob, with the time set for, "every 5 minutes" would look like this:

 */5 * * * * /usr/bin/curl  -s --get --data run=1\;passcode=\;verbose=0  --url http://example.com/cgi-bin/dada/plugins/mailing_monitor.cgi

Command Line

This plugin can also be called directory on the command line and that can itself be used for the cronjob:

        cd /home/youraccount/cgi-bin/dada/plugins; /usr/bin/perl ./mailing_monitor.cgi

You may pass the, --noverbose flag to have the script return nothing at all:

        cd /home/youraccount/cgi-bin/dada/plugins; /usr/bin/perl ./mailing_monitor.cgi --noverbose

By default, it will print out the mailing monitor report.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS

Please, let me know if you find any bugs.

SEE ALSO

The Mailing List Sending FAQ has a whole lot of information about Dada Mail's Mailing Monitor, plugin features and Batch Sending:

http://dadamailproject.com/support/documentation-7_4_1/FAQ-mailing_list_sending.pod.html

AUTHOR

Justin Simoni

See: http://dadamailproject.com/contact

LICENCE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1999 - 2014 Justin Simoni All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.


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