This extension provides an alternative mail transport for TYPO3. This transport catches all outgoing mails and stores them in a database tables. The mail are sent later via a cron job or a Scheduler task.
This extension requires TYPO3 CMS 4.7 or more to function properly.
Version 1.1.0 requires TYPO3 CMS 6.2 or more.
To activate this transport simply set the following configuration:
$GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['MAIL']['transport'] = 'Cobweb\Batchmailer\Service\Transport';
This extension comes with the following options (to configure in the Extension Manager):
- originalTransport
- Since activating this extension implies changing
$GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['MAIL']['transport']whatever original transport might have been there ("smtp", etc.) is lost. However this information is needed for when the mails are actually sent. This is the place to set it. The value here should be what you would have put in$GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['MAIL']['transport']if you weren't using this extension. - storagePid
- Id of the page where the mails should be stored, when sent from another context than FE (e.g. BE, a Scheduler task, etc.). For the FE context, mails are stored by default in the page where they were sent from.
- storagePidOverride
- Force the storage pid to be used even in the FE context.
The mails are actually sent by an Extbase command controller. It is thus possible to either define a cron job with a command like:
/path/to/php /path/to/typo3/cli_dispatch.phpsh extbase mailer:send
or register it with the Scheduler using the Extbase Extbase CommandController Task available since TYPO3 CMS 4.7.
The command controller uses the transport defined in the "originalTransport" configuration discussed above to send the mails.
You will probably want to run this job at a high frequency in order not to delay the mails too much.
In order to be able to send mails in a delayed fashion, the mail objects are stored in database table
tx_batchmailer_domain_model_mail, along with some information for display in the BE. The attachments
are removed from the object and stored in folder uploads/tx_batchmailer/. Mind that this folder could
grow quite a bit over time. There's currently no cleanup task, but it's planned to add one in the future, as needed.
There's no BE module to review the mail records, but they can be viewed in normal Web > List view. All fields are read-only. Actual management of emails could be added in the future, but is not planned for now.
A mail can be in any of four statuses:
- not sent: the mail has not yet been sent
- ok: the mail was sent successfully
- warning: the mail was sent to at least one person, but some problems happened
- error: the mail was not sent (for a variety of reasons) or failed for all recipients.
For each mail a "sent" status is also kept. Mails that are not yet sent, will be sent the next time the command controller is run. If a mail goes through the sending process but is actually sent to no one, its status will be "error", but it will still be considered as sent and thus not retried. This is an edge case which should usually not happen. In general sending a mail will fail in a more drastic way (e.g. the SMTP server is not available) in which cases the mails are not considered sent and will be retried next time.