Intermittent/unreliable sending

Yesterday I scheduled 4 e-mails.

First was a post notification to “auditions & Events” category of newsletter list scheduled for 6:00 pm. It was added to the scheduled tasks at 6:00 pm, as expected. Sometime last night it got removed from the scheduled tasks list, but I did not receive it and it is not in the completed tasks list. No clue as to where it went.

Second was newsletter scheduled for 6:15 pm. It went to the scheduled tasks list at 6:15 pm, as expected and was finally sent at 11:15 pm. (5 hours later! And this is with the server side cron set to every 5 minutes.)

Third was another post notification to “auditions” category scheduled for 6:45 pm. It was added to the scheduled tasks as 6:45 pm as expected. It is still there today at 10:35 am. I thought the problem might be that there were no subscribers in the “auditions” category so I added myself to that category but it is still just sitting in the scheduled tasks list.

The forth one was the same as the third one except to a different category (events). It had the same results.

About 9:00 am this morning I added three additional emails to the subscribers list and signed them up for the newsletter list. I selected “events” for the category for one of them, “Auditions” for the category for the second one and “events & Auditions” as the category for the third one. As of 10:40 am, all three welcome e-mails are still sitting in the scheduled tasks list.

The Task scheduler and MailPoet Sending Service both show connections successful. I am using the server cron which was set to every 5 minutes and I tried setting it to every minute with no change. There are no error messages shown on the “Help – System status” page. There are no messages in the “cron jobs – view output” on the host.

Everything looks to me like it is setup correctly, but sending is erratic at best. Any ideas or suggestions are appreciated.