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Two quick questions regarding the Batch Mode in Email Configuration.  When I enter, say, 100 what is the velocity going to be?  That is, 100 messages per second?  minute?  hour?  day? (!!)

Also, what triggers the batch job?  There is no cronjob happening, so I assume there’s some fake cron action getting triggered on each request to the site or something.  Can you provide some insight here?

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to the EE forums, Max.

When you are using the Communicate tab to send mail to a group, that’s what triggers the batch job. I’m not certain what you mean by velocity, but I’ll find out.

Thanks for the reply, but that doesn’t make sense.  The whole idea of a batch job is that is not all processed immediately when you send a message via the Communicate tab.  I.e. the individual emails get processed in batches, not all at once.  Thus, there must be some mechanism to cause those batches to be sent.  In most email marketing-type software, that is run by a cron job or something similar, which calls a php script every X minutes, triggering another batch to be sent.

Whatever the mechanism, I’d mostly like to know what the batch size means.  To put it another way: If I have say, 1000 addresses on my list, and I choose a batch size of 100, how long will it take for all 1000 messages to be sent?

The whole idea of a batch job is that is not all processed immediately when you send a message via the Communicate tab.  I.e. the individual emails get processed in batches, not all at once.

Quite so.

Thus, there must be some mechanism to cause those batches to be sent.  In most email marketing-type software, that is run by a cron job or something similar, which calls a php script every X minutes, triggering another batch to be sent.

In EE, you need to keep your browser window open, it will refresh periodically and send another batch to the server.

To put it another way: If I have say, 1000 addresses on my list, and I choose a batch size of 100, how long will it take for all 1000 messages to be sent?

That depends on your server. It’s not 100 messages per minute or hour, it’s simply 100 messages per batch.  EE will send all 100 of them to the server, one after the other, which will deal with them as it sees fit, at its own speed, then pause, then send another batch. Lather, rinse, repeat. The default SMTP timeout in EE is 5 seconds.

Thanks, that’s exactly the kind of answer I was after.  Now that I know what to look for, I can see that the batches get sent every 6 seconds or whatever the value is at line 1019 in cp/cp.communicate.php.

Actually, that’s just the refresh rate of the control panel. That said, does that all in all answer your question?

OK, well whatever, it works for me. Yes, that answers my question.

Very good, glad to hear it 😊