Newsletters keep sending multiple times

Can you try to reproduce this on a new site?

Has the site been upgraded from Drupal 6 or is it a new install? Since when are you using Simplenews 7.x-1.x?

Check if there are any errors in the recent log messages, for example mail send errors or pdo exceptions.

It might be that something causes a failure between sending out the mail and updating the record in the database when cron is executed automatically. This would then result in Simplenews trying to re-send because it assumes that sending failed. We had a similar case recently.

We experienced this same problem after upgrading. Newsletters that had been sent in the past were sent again multiple times to each subscriber after this update. I had to manually clear the simplenews_email_spool to stop the emails from being sent.

The site is a drupal 7 not an upgrade. There are no pdo errors in the log. All newsletters are marked as sent. Under the setting cron was not being used to send the emails.

Thanks for looking into this.

Can you clarify what the fix is? I switched the setting to send the newsletter through the cron earlier today, but ran the cron manually to initiate the send. It sent all the emails as regular, but then started sending out duplicate emails afterwards. I had to once again manually clear the table simplenews_email_spool table and disabled the mail system through devel. It looks like the emails are not being removed from simplenews_email_spool.

It looks like the mail spool expiration setting is the issue and not the cron. Changing this to expire the spool immediately prevents the duplicates from being sent.

This is a new bug that was not in the 2012-01-04 dev version that we were running previous to this version.

I'm unable to reproduce this with some basic tests.

Can you please do the following?

1. Change the expire setting to something else than immediate
2. Send a (test with just a few example recipients) newsletter
3. Provide an export of your simplenews_mail_spool table. A few example rows are enough and you can replace the mail address with a dummy one.

status should be 2 and error 0, do you have different values?

When you enable debug logging in the simplenews mail settings, is there anything unusual?

I changed the expire setting to expire after a week and tested sending to a small group (7) and the simplenews_mail_spool table did get the right status for the emails. There were no errors in the log.

The query that fills the send spool seems wrong to me.
In simplenews_get_spool() the query generated is:
SELECT s.* FROM {simplenews_mail_spool} s WHERE ( (status = :db_condition_placeholder_0) OR (status = :db_condition_placeholder_1) OR (s.timestamp < :db_condition_placeholder_2) ) ORDER BY s.timestamp ASC

I think it should be sg. like status = SIMPLENEWS_SPOOL_PENDING OR (status = SIMPLENEWS_SPOOL_IN_PROGRESS AND timestamp< expiration_time)

foreach ($statuses as $status) {
    if ($status == SIMPLENEWS_SPOOL_IN_PROGRESS) {
      $in_progress_and = db_and();
      $in_progress_and->condition('status', $status);
      $in_progress_and->condition('s.timestamp', simplenews_get_expiration_time(), '<');
      $status_or->condition($in_progress_and);
    } else {
      $status_or->condition('status', $status);
    }
  }

Uh, you are of course right!

I had assumed something like that but haven't had time to confirm it.

The attached patch adds a test for this and fixes it. Please test.

Thx. Works as expected.

Thanks for testing, commited and pushed.

It would be nice to have an upgrade including this issue solved, for the rest of us that are not so familiar with patching.
So, I still have my simplenews module malfunctioning, continuously sending emails to 10k addresses, like it happened last night.

Thanks in advance.

This is fixed in the dev snapshot, you do not need to patch anything.