Cron Jobs
Cron jobs are operations that run on your server at pre‐scheduled times (“cron” is an abbreviation of “chronograph”). Cron relies on crontabs; configuration files that manage cron jobs.
Cron jobs can invoke standard command line commands, or call scripts.
Note: In order to process cron jobs, your server must be running cron. Contact your service provider for information.
Interspire Email Marketer uses cron jobs to automatically send pre‐scheduled email campaigns at specified times, and to process autoresponders and bounced emails at specified intervals.
Note: Schedule email campaigns in the Email campaigns > Send email campaign screens.
To set up cron jobs, you need to:
Configuring Cron Jobs in Interspire Email Marketer
Take the following steps to configure cron jobs in Interspire Email Marketer.
- Click Settings in the toolbar. Then, select Cron Settings.
- Select Yes, I want to enable cron support.
If you want to turn Interspire Email Marketer’s cron support off, deselect Yes, I want to enable cron support. The rest of the fields in this screen are hidden.
Note: Cron is enabled by default.
Use the Run every lists to select the frequency with which you want to run the following cron jobs:
- Autoresponders: this controls sending responses to contacts who join your contact lists.
- Bounce processing: this controls emails that could not be delivered to their recipients.
- Scheduled sending: this controls sending pre‐scheduled email campaigns.
- Triggers sending: this controls sending email campaigns initiated by a trigger event.
- Maintenance process: this controls the auto-clearing of import files and export files that have passed the stall time. (Stall time cut-off is within 4 hours.)
- Auto-delete Unconfirmed Subscribers: this controls the auto-deleting process of uncomfirmed subscribers.
- Auto-delete Bounced Subscribers: this controls the auto-deleting process of bounced subscribers.
- Split test campaigns: this controls performing split testing of two or more email campaigns.
If you want to stop a cron job, select Disable in its Run every list.
The Last run fields display the time at which the job was last performed. The Next run field displays the time at which the job is next scheduled to run.Click Save to save your changes in this screen. Alternatively, click Cancel to return to the Home screen without saving your changes.
Cron Support on Your Server
Take the following steps to configure cron support on your server:
- Click Settings in Interspire Email Marketer’s toolbar. Then, select Cron Settings.
- Copy the command in the Cron command to run field. This is the path to the batch script that runs Interspire Email Marketer’s cron jobs.
- Note the most frequent entry in the Run every column. You will need to configure the cron job to run on your server at least as often as this.
- Log in to your server and configure the crontab file to run the command you copied from Interspire Email Marketer’s Cron command to run field.
- For information on configuring your server’s crontab via command line commands, see Cron Via Commands.
Cron Via Commands
To set up cron via command line interface, telnet to your server, or use its control panel command line interface. Enter the edit crontab command:
crontab -e
Next, configure the cron job. Enter the command you copied from Interspire Email Marketer’s Cron command to run field, preceded by five asterisks:
*****/path/to/php -f /path/to/emailmarketer/admin/cron/cron.php
Note: This command is only an example; yours may be different.
The asterisks allow you to specify the frequency with which the …/cron.php script is called, as shown:
Note: For the Day of Month and Day of Week, you can also enter the full month or day (for example, “march” and “tuesday”). This is not case‐sensitive.
- An asterisk indicates a wildcard. Thus, if you enter “*****” the script is run every minute of every hour of every day of every month.
- Alternatively, you can enter a number to specify a time, or enter a range (“3‐6”, for instance).
- You can also specify frequency by entering “/n”, meaning every n units. So, entering “/5” in the Minute of hour column means “every five minutes.”
Note: If you have no specific reason to limit frequency, it is recommended that you set your cron to run every minute; this allows you to use Interspire Email Marketer’s email scheduling feature with minute‐to‐minute precision. You can set other features (autoresponders and bounce processing) to run more infrequently in Interspire Email Marketer’s interface, if required.
Note: Please click the following link for more information on Cron: https://www.interspire.com/setting-up-scheduled-sending-using-cron/