Limit number of emails sent per hour / email throttling

[jacko]

It would be great to have email queue system that makes sure that no more than a specific number of emails per hour can be sent from the forum.

 

[Seeker-Smith]

Perhaps those that need this should vote on this post. Go to first post and up vote.

 

[Black Tiger]

These days with anti spam measures it's a must have in fact. I'm a hoster myself and we limit the outgoing emails at 500 per email address. Per day!
Exceptions can be made, but we are not eager to do this as these days also birthday messages get reported as spam. Unbelievable that people don't even like a birthday message, but this do gets servers into those dynamic blacklists with hotmail. Which is not nice for other customers on the servers.
Also lots of mails per minute to the same provider, like hotmail and gmail can get you on their grey or blacklist.

I also remember there were limitations for that in vBulletin, so I'm going to convert to Xen (from IPB) in januari and +1 for this.
Just a must have theyse days.

 

[snoopy5]

My posting was deleted. It was called "bumping".

mmmmhhhh.... Posting something in a thread is bumping. What is going on here?

Deleting user comments does neither help you nor will the need or desire for this feature will go away by this. I run around 30 Xenforo forums. I know what I am talking about.

There are not many options to get sleepers back and grow the interaction with our users. Sending emails is basically by far the best option for this.

If webhosters get every year more aggressive with blacklisting, you should think about a solution to help your customers not to get blacklisted.

This is not bumping. This is a discussion abou pro and cons for this feature-suggestion.

If you do not like these discussions, change the rules and allow only polls instead of discussion threads.

 

[otto]

Would be great to have such a function in Xenforo core to prevent to be marked as a spamer in bigger boards.

 

[Rdimaggio]

Is there seriously no email throttling function built into XenForo by now?

 

[snoopy5]

Is there seriously no email throttling function built into XenForo by now?

no, still not existing. Although it is a no brainer that this is really needed to avoid getting blacklisted.

I just do not understand where the priorities in the development are.

It is nice to have additional features every few months, but we have to make sure, that the basics of running a community forum are really covered and thought through.

This feature request is not cosmetic. It is really essential in surviving for admins. Especially for small forums with no budget for expensive paid mailing lists.

 

[Rdimaggio]

It seems like a basic functionality that should have been included in the software from the beginning.

 

[FTL]

It seems like a basic functionality that should have been included in the software from the beginning.

There are so many basic featues requested for XF that get upvoted but we still don't have. Can't believe that this suggestion is 12 years old and still nothing. What gives?

 

[Hareon]

My host is limited to 100 e-mails per hour. This suggestion is important to me.

 

[snoopy5]

My host is limited to 100 e-mails per hour. This suggestion is important to me.

This suggestion was repeated again and again since 2010.

After 14 years, I do not think that the decision makers are willing to implement this feature. They might wait until the competition offers it and then introduce it two years later

(yes, this is meant sarcastic - unfortunately)

 

[TUG]

this ever get solved?

apparently yahoo has now blocked all mail from my xenforo server due to " 421 4.7.0 [TSS04] Messages from 69.16.236.219 temporarily deferred due to unexpected volume or user complaints "

reaching out to yahoo support has verified i abide by all guidelines and necessary configurations (our site has existed for nearly 30 years, not a typo) without ever being on a blacklist...so this is pretty frustrating.

it started on the 17th and is still going, my queue JUST to yahoo is over 5000 emails long...most of which are forum/thread watch notifications which i wouldnt consider overly important, but its also blocking all registration confirmation emails as well as password reminder emails as well for yahoo, aol, cox, etc...all the emails under the yahoo umbrella.

 

[BikeGremlin]

As far as I can see, there is this option:

Admin Control Panel -> Options -> Email options ->
"Activity summary email batch limit"

Described as:
"The activity summary emails are sent daily by default and this value controls how many emails are sent at a time."

That's not a hard hourly limit - doesn't look like it.

I like that XenForo developers don't put every suggested feature in the core - you can overdo that and there are many downsides.
Of course, separate addons also have their problems (price and compatibility when updating XenForo).
Still, this does look like a very important, basic functionality (I could be wrong, but that's how I see it).

I just "played" with a SMF forum - there is a built in option for these two things:

• Number of emails sent per page load (that looks like the XenForo's "Activity summary email batch limit").
• Number of emails sent per minute (which can be set to say for, limiting the sending to 240 emails per hour effectivelly).

 

[TUG]

yes I did go reduce the frequency (and adjust the settings for who gets those summary emails) and that should certainly help based on the defaults...at least for larger forums.

the issue I am having is there are one or two forums (and thread) which have hundreds if not thousands of users with configured watch list notifications when a new post or reply is made.

thus when someone posts a half dozen or more new threads or posts, the number of watch list emails sent goes up exponentially.

out of the 4 or 5 thousand "delayed" emails we were working thru, 2 single watch lists notifications made up the bulk of them....and those were just to yahoo customers.

 

[BikeGremlin]

yes I did go reduce the frequency (and adjust the settings for who gets those summary emails) and that should certainly help based on the defaults...at least for larger forums.

the issue I am having is there are one or two forums (and thread) which have hundreds if not thousands of users with configured watch list notifications when a new post or reply is made.

thus when someone posts a half dozen or more new threads or posts, the number of watch list emails sent goes up exponentially.

out of the 4 or 5 thousand "delayed" emails we were working thru, 2 single watch lists notifications made up the bulk of them....and those were just to yahoo customers.

Yup - understand what you mean. I'd also add this:

By not fixing the email stuff, XenForo devs might be shooting themselves in the foot. Let me explain:

Forum owners should be encouraged to encourage user engagement (and forum growth). One of those things are email notifications, subscriptions etc. That should be made easy and convenient to configure and run without any fancy or expensive infrastructure - and limiting the number of emails per hour (or minute) is the simplest way to do it.

Forums are already dying (feel free to disagree, but please make it in a separate thread). Let's do what's up to us to slow down that trend (don't think we can reverse it, not really).

That's why I think this is an essential core feature.

Relja

P.S. Edit:
I just sorted the suggestions thread by the number of votes. This feature is on page 4. So, at least according to users, it is not a priority.

I suppose I'll have to code something custom in that case.
I'll laso think twice before migrating or recommending the migration of any larger user-number forums to XenForo (no sarcasm - it is what it is).
Such is life.

 

[TUG]

working with my host, we discovered a way to limit outbound sent mail per hour from a domain. (rest just remains queued until the next hour etc).