Support

August 10, 2024 at 3:53 am

Hi there,

Issues with message queue system like you are mentioned usually mean an issue with WP_CRON (the message system relies on WP_CRON to function). But… your opening post suggests the message queue is actually working so I’ll start with how it should work.

The message queue works on WP_CRON (a pseudo schedule system built into WordPress) and has a separate task set for Generating and Sending messages that run every 5 mins (due to how WP_CRON works we can’t say for certain that will actually run every 5 mins). WP_CRON relies on page visits to function, it basically sits in the background and any time a page is visited in your site it jumps in and checks for any tasks that have been scheduled and if they should be run yet… short of it, its relies on page visits.

When a message is triggered within EE and it is using the message queue it will add a record within the database that stores the message to generate and the registration it relates to.

That’s the ‘Waiting to Generate’ step, it’s waiting for the Generate cron to run. On a site with regular traffic that will likely run every 5 mins and the message generates, at that point it switching over to ‘Waiting to Send’, now its waiting for the ‘Sending’ task to run, again, that relies on site visits. Then it runs, sends the message and if no errors are returned it will show as sent.

(I’ve overly simplified at lot of this just to keep this short, the idea is still the same just the specific details of what is stored not)

So with knowing that and without more details on how long the messages are sitting waiting, this:

1. “Registration Approved” messages are stuck in “Queued for Generation”. They successfully generate if I manually generate them.
2. “Registration Approved” messages are stuck in “Queued for Sending”. They send when I manually send them.

Sounds like all of that is working. Messages are adding to the queue and waiting for the above takes to run. You said some are sitting on ‘Waiting to Send’, which means the generation task ran… you manually send them and they send, so the message worked its waiting for the crons to run.

I don’t know how long your waiting, or if your expecting them to send immediately and assuming they are ‘stuck’, or if they are actually stuck but right now they may well have been working as expected.

I can walk through how to investigate that further to see if you’d like?

3. Sometimes, but not all the time, the “Registration Approved” message type will not be received by the recipient, even though EE says the message was sent. If I re-send the message manually it appears in the recipient’s inbox.

This one usually shows an issue with how the server is set up to send email.

If EE shows as ‘sent’ then all of the above happened without any errors, think of it as sending a letter, you did all of the processing, seal the envelope, added the stamp and passed it over at the post office who smiled and waved you on.

If your letter didn’t arrive from there, you did everything you were suppose to up to the point you could control.

So, with that, I need more details on your mail setup.

Who hosts your domains email? For example gmail?

Is the site set up to send email through them or are you just using your hosts mail server?

I have noticed that the “Payment Confirmation” email is always successfully generated, sent, and received almost instantly. Why am I having problems with the “Registration Approved” messages?

Payment related emails are assigned the highest priority and are generally processed immediately, sort of skipping the queue above.

Registration related emails are set within the queue.

Why? Because payment emails send to inform the regisrant a payment has been processed, without them people tend to panic thinking the payment hasn’t gone through and sometimes add another payment (so the risk to causing issues from emails is less than the risk of double payments, so we send immediately).

Registration confirmations are NOT as critical as the above, if they take a few minutes to come through via email, generally, that’s fine. Theres a registration confirmation shown on the thank you page (infact there’s also a payment related confirmation).

Resolved after setting “Generate and send all messages:” On the same request.

By doing this you effectively remove the message queue from the system, it can work, but we added the message queue within EE because of issues people has with emails.

EE doesn’t ‘send’ emails, it basically builds out the content and passes that to wp_mail() which does its own processing and then passes it over to your server to do whatever it is set up to do with emails. Issues there (which are outside of Event Espresso’s control) can cause issues with registrations so I recommend using the message queue.