Email Subscribers & Newsletters BUG: Plugin often sends emails multiple times

  • I’ve been reporting this bug before. Unfortunately recent updates did not solve the problem. We are using the cron feature, but I think it is a general design issue.

    You desperately need to change the algorithm of the sending procedure. You have to to first set the “sent status” of a subscriber BEFORE the actual send procedure starts because if the script is interrupted for some reason it is unavoidable that emails are sent multiple times.

    This is the worst thing a newsletter solution can do because many subscribers will unsubscribe if they receive emails multiple times.

    As long as this bug is not fixed the plugin is definitely not ready for production use!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Malay Ladu

    (@malayladu)

    Hello Michael,

    Thanks for your feedback.

    We have implemented it the way you explained..

    Need to check in which case it’s not working as expected..

    Will look into it and fix it as soon as possible.

    Just want to make sure you are using the latest version of Email Subscribers.

    Thread Starter Michael

    (@michael8888)

    I skimmed through your code and I don’t think that the plugin currently prevents the sending of duplicates. Actually, we had a case where some subscribers received 10 copies which resulted in a wave of complaints and many of our subscribers unsubscribed.

    I think you can replicate the problem by creating a cron job with several hundred email addresses and then just launch the cron URL twice. Note that this is just one case where your plugin will send an email multiple times to the same address. This only demonstrates that your plugin is unable to prevent duplicates. We also observed that the problem usually occurs when the server is under stress.

    I hacked now into your plugin to prevent this from happening again. Whenever an email is sent I create a text file with the email subject as filename. I then add the email address to this file. Before an email with a certain subject is stent I first check if the address is in this file and if it is, I exit the function. This appears to work so far.

    Of course, this is just a quick-and-dirty solution. I hope you can fix this serious bug in your plugin.

    Plugin Contributor Malay Ladu

    (@malayladu)

    Hello Michael,

    Thanks for pointing this out.

    We will check it and fix it in the next version of Email Subscribers.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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