Issues with mail provider for tracking and mail delivery

Your software
My Mautic version is: 3.3.3
My PHP version is: 7.4.3
My Database type and version is: MySQL 8.0.25

Your problem
My problem is:
We have been trying to use Mautic for our newsletters and such recently, but have had some issues. Most of them comes from two points: mail delivery and tracking. Basically Mautic has been unstable for us, not always working properly. Sending mail often fails and we have to retry several times. Tracking what emails is opened, links clicked etc. seems to work for some users, but weā€™ve gotten reports back from users that have read and clicked on the email but without anything showing up in Mautic.

What weā€™re asking is what we can do to ensure Mautic is working as good as possible. Right now weā€™re using gmail which weā€™ve heard has some issues. Is there another mail provider we should use instead for Mautic? Anyone that has had a good experience with another mail provider?

And to debug these issues weā€™ve been having, where should we look to see logs/errors and what kind of ways can we test solutions to these issues? Weā€™re not sure where to look. We have full SSH access to the server where Mautic is running, so we can access anything on it.

These errors are showing in the log:
Not sure what logs to show here.

Steps I have tried to fix the problem:
Weā€™ve tried with different mail providers like outlook but had different issues to get it configured so that is why weā€™re asking here

Hello!

We have been trying to use Mautic for our newsletters and such recently, but have had some issues. Most of them comes from two points: mail delivery and tracking. Basically Mautic has been unstable for us, not always working properly. Tracking what emails is opened, links clicked etc. seems to work for some users, but weā€™ve gotten reports back from users that have read and clicked on the email but without anything showing up in Mautic.

What amounts of emails are we talking about? If you send out 100k very fast, many people open those emails, then you can see a sudden surge in traffic. If your server canā€™t handle it, then you will have issues with tracking.

Tracking can be problematic for outlook contacts as well. Itā€™s not Mautic specific, itā€™s outlook specific. If outlook blocks the tracking images, you simply canā€™t track. Again, not Mautic specific.

Sending mail often fails and we have to retry several times.

What does fail mean? Is this campaign emails or segment emails? Are you using Queue? What SMTP do you use for sending?

What weā€™re asking is what we can do to ensure Mautic is working as good as possible. Right now weā€™re using gmail which weā€™ve heard has some issues. Is there another mail provider we should use instead for Mautic? Anyone that has had a good experience with another mail provider?

What do you mean? Gmail as smtp or Gmail as software? Cause the question is like: we have been using a skateboard until now, and we have problems with fighter jets.

You can start by answering the questions above.
Iā€™m sure weā€™ll figure it out.

Thanks,
Joey

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Hello.

We are talking about 500-1000~ emails at once, tops.

Weā€™ve had issues with for example sending segment or campaign emails where mautic hangs for a while and just fail to send. Iā€™ll ask my collegue if they have any details but as far as I understood there wasnā€™t any particular error message either. Weā€™re a few thats been working on this.

Iā€™m not sure about queue or where that is setup. We tried to figure out batching or queueing but we didnā€™t manage to do so yet so we are just sending everything at once.

Sorry, I meant we are using gmail for smtp and imap. We are using an email from gmail for everything that requires an email.

Thanks for your reply. Hopefully we can find out how to do this :slight_smile:

To setup queue go to setting, go to email, select queue and save. Add the spool send cron

To debug set Debug = True in mautic/app/config/local.php

I use tail to monitor logs on the fly

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I would focus on enabling the queue. There are not much email providers who like to receive 1000 emails in a couple of seconds. Gmail has not only a limit of how much emails you can send each day, but also a rate limit, if you send to fast you will get problems. I heard that they can put emails in the sent folder, without really sending the emails.

but weā€™ve gotten reports back from users that have read and clicked on the email but without anything showing up in Mautic

What kind of hosting do you use? Shared hosting? A VPS?

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Hey,
Gmail will limit you to daily 500, but it might be less depending on your deliverability. It is also possible, that they would apply a cap for you hourly. I would not use gmail as smtp at all.

If you are interested in how queue and email sending works check this video: This Is How Email Sending Works In Mautic - YouTube , It will explain which crons to use and how everything works.

Joey

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Hello.

@EJL Thanks. Weā€™ve enabled debug mode and weā€™re going to test email queue.

@dimitri Alright. Weā€™re going to try to enable the queue and do some test sendings of larger volumes to see if they seem to send out properly and get tracked properly. Perhaps thats the entire issue.

Our server for Mautic is hosted at Digital Ocean.

@joeyk Thanks for the tips. Weā€™re looking into seeing if there are better alternatives for smtp servers. Is there any type of smtp servers / mail providers that youā€™ve had good experience with for Mautic?

Thank you all for the assistance. Very appreciated.

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Try Amazon SES, Sendgrid, Pepipost - very good integrations.

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Here is an article about gmail limits. Usage limits Ā |Ā  Gmail API Ā |Ā  Google Developers

They have a 250 actions per second limit, for all actions, and a 100 actions a second for sending. The queue method for sending in Mautic allows you to send slower.

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I was talking about the daily messages limits:

Messages per day
Daily sending limit* 2,000 (500 for trial accounts)

https://support.google.com/a/answer/166852?hl=en

Gmail has daily limits, which are different for the free gmail.com addresses and for gsuite. And they have limits per second, which are almost not talked about, but which are there.

Just like with Amazon, a daily limit of often 50k, but also a limit of a maximum of 14 messages per second.

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Hi,
I couldnā€™t find any information about ā€˜unlimitedā€™ sending, not 50k limits.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/175121?hl=en

Max is 2500 what I can see. And as far as I know Gmail hammers it down if your deliverability is not superb. Can you please link your resource here, Iā€™m really curious.

Thx,
Joey

The 50k was about Amazon :wink: It is the most common limit, what people usually get when they apply for the permission to send emails.

Yeah sure sorry. Canā€™t read english :slight_smile:

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Iā€™ve some issues setting up email queuing. The moment I enable mails are no longer being sent. I can see that they added to the ā€œvar/spoolā€ directory, but whenver I run the command for sending messages it doesnā€™t work, it just says 0 messages have been processed.

E.g I click ā€œsend test emailā€ and is told its succesful.
I run command ā€œphp bin/console mautic:messages:sendā€ from mautic root.
It tells me 0 messages has been processed.
No email seems to have been sent.

Same with campaign-sent mail. Email sending works when queue is disabled. Am I missing something?

This is the config, it should be standard values I think.

Run the bin/console swiftmailer:spool:send command

Great. That seems to work. Thank you very much! :slight_smile:
Do you know why this command has to be used? The documentation I was reading doesnā€™t mention this at all (e.g Cron jobs | Mautic). Is there another documentation page with details regarding this?

Is this different then mautic:messages:send ?

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swiftmailer:spool:send Sends emails from the spool

Here is the output for the help command for this function

Description:
Sends emails from the spool

Usage:
swiftmailer:spool:send [options]

Options:
ā€“message-limit=MESSAGE-LIMIT The maximum number of messages to send.
ā€“time-limit=TIME-LIMIT The time limit for sending messages (in seconds).
ā€“recover-timeout=RECOVER-TIMEOUT The timeout for recovering messages that have taken too long to send (in seconds).
ā€“mailer=MAILER The mailer name.
ā€“transport=TRANSPORT The service of the transport to use to send the messages.
-h, --help Display this help message
-q, --quiet Do not output any message
-V, --version Display this application version
ā€“ansi Force ANSI output
ā€“no-ansi Disable ANSI output
-n, --no-interaction Do not ask any interactive question
-e, --env=ENV The Environment name. [default: ā€œprodā€]
ā€“no-debug Switches off debug mode.
-v|vv|vvv, --verbose Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug

Help:
The swiftmailer:spool:send command sends all emails from the spool.

Hi, I would like to know if swiftmailer:spool:send is different than mautic:messages:send. Thank you