Campaign Email processing on 1and1 shared hosts

[silicon.rockstar]

Ok, here's some interesting stuff regarding batch campaign email processing on 1and1 shared servers

Sugar 5.5.2
1and1 shared server - LAMP, Business level (includes SSH/cron functionality)
PHP5 (forced via xmapp directive in .htaccess file because 1and1 defaults to PHP 4.4.9)

I was trying to set up automatic campaign email processing. I had successfully configured crontab to run sugar/cron.php at five minute intervals (cron is only available on 1and1 Business level hosting or higher). The problem is that when cron.php is called like this it uses the PHP binary at /usr/local/bin/php. On 1and1's servers, this binary is PHP version 4.4.9. When it tries to process cron.php, you get something like the following in terminal:

syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR in /homepages/blah/blah/blah/sugar/include/utils.php on like 1018.

So, as a workaround, you can call sugar/cron.php 'externally' using a cURL script, as elucidated here:

http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10318

Basically, your crontab should look like

*/5 * * * * curl --silent http://YourSugarInstallURL/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1

This hits the cron script just like a webbrowser would (actually, you can point your browser to the URL above and watch it process, it returns a sequence of 1's for some reason I don't understand but it works). Doing it this way avoids bypassing Apache's .htaccess configuration, therefore running the script using the php5 parser, and successfully sending a batch of your queued campaign emails.

Whew. And yay!

As far as batch size goes, 1and1 has a limit of 99 emails per account per hour. My list is small, so in Scheduler I have the frequency set to every five minutes and in the Campaign Email Settings I have the 'Number Sent per Batch' set to 6, for a total of 72 emails per hour. Seems to work ok so far.

Hope that helps someone out, I've spent about three days working on getting Sugar to send mass emails and it hasn't been pretty but she's humming along pretty good now

[a]

[fajada]

I have the same problem could you tell me how you fixed your problem?

Thanks,

John