Stopping thousands of Cron DEmons!

I was advised that if I want my bulk mailer to work I had to insert my email address in the Cron Job place. I've done that. Now I get a Cron Daemon every minute. I've just deleted 20,000 of them. How do I stop them? I've tried to reduce them to one a month but I notice they advise amateurs not to mess with Cron Jobs. Please help, before I go mad.

Hello

If you added your email address via Hosts Cpanel -> Cron Jobs then you may remove it back from there. Cron Jobs won't stop if you do this. The email is needed to send notifications, errors, etc which appear during cron job execution.

Also you may create some new bug report email address and use it for Cron Jobs only. It would be better because sometimes you'll need to check how it's working.

I receive a Cron Daemon every minute. I've actually received over 50,000 of them.

If I delete my email address from the Cron Job file it means I can't send bulk emails - right?

You can remove that email, as it's only for sending reports from the cron job.  It won't stop the mass mailer or other features from working, but you won't receive emails about problems, like with video processing.  I second AntonLV's suggestion for making a new, cron-related email and using that.

Also, it wouldn't hurt to check those emails, since 55K (if over a short while) doesn't sound right.

Thanks Anton and Nathan. I've deleted my email address from the Cron Job area and the Daemons have stopped. My bulk mail sender still doesn't work but I'll get onto TMD Hosting to see if they can figure out what the problem is.

All I get at the moment is:

Queue status:

3047 mails in the queue

Good to see the emails stopped, but shooting the messenger isn't a real solution.  I still recommend you take a look at those emails for error messages.  It's never good to ignore errors.

I thought I'd have another shot at fixing the Cron Daemon problem. I set the Common Setting for One per Week yet the system still sends them one per minute. Crazy as...

I'm invited to type in a Command so I told it to get a haircut. What are they asking for?

Bit confused... (Especially about that last part.)

You might be receiving error messages from Dolphin, which works separate from the cron job.  But I haven't seen an email, so no idea.

I too am getting bombarded with emails every min from the cron job. The job is fussing about my hosting providers php version and that fopen is not set correctly. However (and I'm not the expert here) I believe this is caused by the "generic" cron job install instructions. The install advised to copy this to your crontab:

MAILTO=you@domain.com

* * * * * cd /kunden/homepages/35/d405166167/htdocs/periodic; /usr/local/bin/php -q cron.php

From what I understand about Linux those *'s are commands.

Each of the sections is separated by a space, with the final section having one or more spaces in it. No spaces are allowed within Sections 1-5, only between them. Sections 1-5 are used to indicate when and how often you want the task to be executed. This is how a cron job is laid out:

minute (0-59), hour (0-23, 0 = midnight), day (1-31), month (1-12), weekday (0-6, 0 = Sunday), command

So.. I'm changing my crontab file to read

00 04 * * * cd /kunden/homepages/35/d405166167/htdocs/periodic; /usr/local/bin/php -q cron.php

So if I did my research correctly I should only get 1 email at 4am.. is this correct?

Did that work? I've just given up. I'm sending the cron daemons into cyber space and I'll purchase a bulk email sender that works.

@xtater - The Dolphin cron needs to run once per minute (* * * * *). Every time that file executes it looks at the cron commands that Dolphin has setup in the database and decides which of them needs to be run THAT MINUTE. If you set it up for anything other than * * * * * you might as well not set it up at all.

@bisexualaustrailia - What response did TMD give you? It should take them less than 5 minutes to check your cron job and see what the error is.

Gotta' love that I keep asking for the contents of the emails, but keep getting ignored.

I'm sorry Nathan, I didn't mean to ignore you. Haven't been back for a while. I can't remember what the Cron Daemons said, I've redirected them to a fictitious email address so there are 1,440 Cron Daemons every day ending up in cyber space. There seems to be no way of stopping them, or if there is, no one knows how. No matter what they convey, no one needs to be informed 60 times per hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Of course no one knows the error or how to stop the daemon horde - You won't share the emails.

It's kind of like having a routine check-up at the doctors and then ignoring their phone calls because it might be bad news.  The bad news is still there, and you ignoring it will only make things worse.

.....and then giving the doctor a fake phone number so he will never be able to reach you :-)

I'm not getting my message across am I. I'm not trying to hide from the doctor, I just want to reduce his emails from one a minute to one a day. I'm convinced that no one here would accept 1,440 cron daemons every day. There must be a way of reducing them. 

 No, no one here would accept 1440 cron emails a day.. but most people would fix the problem as opposed to using a fake email. If the cron job was setup correctly and everything was normal on the server you would get ONE email a day at midnight. Oh and one every time a video was processed of mass mails were sent out. You are getting them once a minute because something is wrong.

The cron job is something you should be able to email your host and have them fix.. it should take them less than 2 minutes to do. Once they fix it these emails will stop.

Everything you say make 100% sense. The problem beginners face is they don't know how to fix the problem and no one can advise them how to fix the problem. The host doesn't know. No one here knows. We're just told, "fix the problem and everything will be cool."

 RE:

 What you can't seem to get through your head, is that the content of the cron emails holds the key to what the problem is. 

Frustrated, I ended up having a priest perform an exorcism on the server.  Turns out holy water and electronics don't mix.  Great barbecue, though.

But bisexualaustralia, have fun using a Dolphin site with an unknown error which could rear its ugly head at any moment.  In case you decide to put the batteries back in the smoke detector, do this:

1. Use a real email address.
2. Wait a minute or two for an email to appear from the demon horde.
3. Remove the real email address for now.
4. Read the sent email and/or post it here for our Exorcism Task Force to review.

Well, I still haven't managed to fix my bulk mail problem. I've been communicating with TMD Hosting for several weeks recently and they don't know how to fix the problem. Everyone here tries to be helpful but they're not really grasping the problem. I'll try again in case anyone gets what it is I'm trying to achieve.

Here is my latest correspondence with TMD Hosting. They just tell me to go to Bulk Mail in the Tools section. That's like road side assistance telling me to check the engine. No help whatsoever:

David, you've been helpful in the past but for some reason everybody is failing to help me here. I am aware exactly how to reach the Mass Mailer within the tools sections but, how can I put this... It doesn't work! What I need is advice on how to set up the bulk mailer so that it works. It has something to do with the Cron management, that much I've ascertained from Boonex Forums. Beyond that they couldn't help. When I go into Cron management it asks me to provide a Command. I have no idea what is required here.

Please, could you hand this request over to someone on your team who understands how the Bulk Mail system works on Boonex Dolphin web sites.

Thank you.

Well, I still haven't managed to fix my bulk mail problem. I've been communicating with TMD Hosting for several weeks recently and they don't know how to fix the problem. Everyone here tries to be helpful but they're not really grasping the problem. I'll try again in case anyone gets what it is I'm trying to achieve.

Here is my latest correspondence with TMD Hosting. They just tell me to go to Bulk Mail in the Tools section. That's like road side assistance telling me to check the engine. No help whatsoever:

David, you've been helpful in the past but for some reason everybody is failing to help me here. I am aware exactly how to reach the Mass Mailer within the tools sections but, how can I put this... It doesn't work! What I need is advice on how to set up the bulk mailer so that it works. It has something to do with the Cron management, that much I've ascertained from Boonex Forums. Beyond that they couldn't help. When I go into Cron management it asks me to provide a Command. I have no idea what is required here.

Please, could you hand this request over to someone on your team who understands how the Bulk Mail system works on Boonex Dolphin web sites.

Thank you.

Do you mean the cron job settings under cPanel?  If so, you need to set the cron job to run every minute (*) and enter something like this for the command:

/path/to/php -q /path/to/dolphin/periodic/cron.php

Check header.inc.php for the actual paths.

Would still love to know what those 50K emails were about, if you're still having that problem.

And we are going to continue to be of little help until you provide a copy of some of these mails your getting from cron.

You have been asked twice to show them to us.

Cron does not send emails to you unless a error is occurring. The emails you get will contain important information that may help determine what the problem is. So until you show them to us, we can't determine the exact cause of the problem.

Nathan Paton has asked twice for a copy of a couple of those emails. So why have you not provided them yet?