Users frustrated with too many emails for watched threads

[SJ77]

From my user

"

I have several watched threads. A week or two ago what would happen is that I'd get an email when a new reply had occurred.  Then until I viewed the thread I would NOT GET MORE EMAILS for more replies.  The idea being I don't need 6 email reminders for the same thing while I'm asleep....

 

With the new forum I get an email for every single reply, meaning whenever I get one email reminder I get 4 or 5 or 6 instead of one.  If possible I'd like it to go back to the way it was before, otherwise I might have to stop subscribing to threads because I'm getting spammed pretty hard by the new way this feature works."

[Rikki]

The last few releases have included this option in your notification settings:

 

[chilihead]

Sounds like your conversion (assuming old forum is different software) did not map the setting correctly you should file that a  bug in the converter to help others.  

[Lindy]

This feature was recently introduced. Not a bug. 

[jackflash]

1 hour ago, Rikki said:

The last few releases have included this option in your notification settings:

 

is it set by default with "one e-mail per day with all new content from that day?"

[chilihead]

15 minutes ago, Lindy said:

This feature was recently introduced. Not a bug. 

I have a vB conversion from 3.9 planned, will it map the setting since both have it? Or will it be coming to the converter? Trying to avoid same issue, thanks.

[Rikki]

I believe it's no to both of those questions.

[chilihead]

Thanks for the answer.

[Jan Krohn]

I have another issue with this now. As too many users have this option set by default, my forum is sending large number of emails to each member until they change this option as Rikki said.

Is it possible to change this globally?

Here's the error:

    Domain wincert.net has exceeded the max emails per hour (617/500 (123%)) allowed.  Message will be reattempted later

[Admonstrator]

@Nikica It seems to be a issue with your hosting provider. You have to check that issue with your hosting provider.

[Jan Krohn]

4 minutes ago, Admonstrator said:

@Nikica It seems to be a issue with your hosting provider. You have to check that issue with your hosting provider.

Yes, I am aware that this is related to hosting restrictions. I wonder if this number of 500 emails per hours is a default setting or not?

That's why I asked if it is possible to change it globally. But yes, I'll also have to contact my host about this restriction.

Thx.

[Morrigan]

@Nikica It's a host by host basis.

[Tracy Perry]

To clarify what @Morrigan is saying.. the 500 amount is NOT an IPS restriction - it appears that there is no restriction set for the # that IPS will send and no throttling/queueing is done.  If you have 1500 to go in that hour, it will gladly process them (from my understanding).  The 500 per hour is strictly a restriction from your hosting provider on the use of their MTA services.  They should be able to raise that - but depending on the host, they may not do it for more than a few hundred.  if you are getting where you are sending a lot of mail per hour, then I'd look into engaging a service like Mandrill for your mail processing.   Since they have paid tiers of service, they offer higher per hour processing rates.

 

 

[Admonstrator]

6 minutes ago, Tracy Perry said:

 

To clarify what @Morrigan is saying.. the 500 amount is NOT an IPS restriction

 

But in fact it would be nice if there would be an option to configure a limit within IPS. Something like "send only 500 mails per hour"

[Morrigan]

1 minute ago, Admonstrator said:

But in fact it would be nice if there would be an option to configure a limit within IPS. Something like "send only 500 mails per hour"

While it would be awesome, this is a server level configuration. Never will be an IPS option.

[Tracy Perry]

7 minutes ago, Admonstrator said:

But in fact it would be nice if there would be an option to configure a limit within IPS. Something like "send only 500 mails per hour"

There's no effective way you could in reality do that.... because what if you tell it 500 an hour, and that hour you have 650 to go... well, the next hour you can only send 350, but if you have 550, now you are 200 behind... and it would keep going - odds are you would never be able to flush the queue and get it empty.  As @Morrigan said, it's a server level configuration.  The MTA (Postfix, Exim, etc) can be configured to throttle to a set # per hour itself, but if you have it set for 500 an hour, and you are throwing 600-800 an hour at it, it will never catch up unless you hit a dead spot where you only have a few hundred an hour going out.  That's why services like Mandrill, Sendy, AmazonSES, etc exist.

[Admonstrator]

@Tracy Perry OK, I see, it's not an option. But yeah, due to the fact that you can use some 3rd party mail provider this should not be an hugh problem.

[rgf100]

This is a pet gripe of mine and me and others have been grumbling about it for months

 3.4 worked great in this respect - you had the choice to get 'immediate' or 'offline' notifications *per topic*. 4.0 changed that to immediate, daily or weekly. After some moaning they put in the setting Rikki refers to - but it's global, not *per topic*, so you can't map from 3.4 to 4.0. 

That's a step backwards. It's hard to see how best to handle this on upgrade. Send out a ton more notifications, hit your mail sending limits, annoy people; or send out a ton less and reduce activity on your site. I guess the second, but...