What Cron Jobs are, why do I need to add them and how?

What Cron Jobs are, why do I need to add them and how?

What is a cron job?
A detailed explanation about crons is given in the wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
Long story short, a cron is a task that runs at regular intervals on your linux server.
Being a task, it means that at the time it runs, it will do an action and in AppMail case, this means it will send campaigns, process bounces, do cleanup and so on.

Why do I need to add them?
The reason why AppMail uses cron jobs is very simple, the tasks that it runs, to send campaigns for example, are tasks that can take a long time to execute and if you run these tasks as a regular web page, then not only we would need to interact with these pages in order to trigger the actions, but also it would mean we need to keep those pages open as long as they execute and that the execution might fail for a dozen of reasons (say script timeout, or memory limit, etc). Using cron jobs, all these actions are handled without our interaction and can run for unlimited time without the need of interaction.

How do I add them?
The bright side is that control panels like CPanel or Plesk will give you a web interface to add your cron jobs easier.
Youtube has a bunch of videos for CPanel, Plesk , DirectAdmin and others, so there shouldn’t be a problem adding yours no matter what control panel you are using.

    • Related Articles

    • Cron jobs setup

      Maybe the most important thing that you have to do after you install the application is to make sure all the cron jobs are set properly. This is very important since without the cron jobs, the application will not be able to send any email at all, or ...

    • What are the cron jobs that I have to add?

      Here is the current cron jobs list for versions >= 1.3.4.9. {FULL_PATH_TO_APPS_FOLDER} is the absolute path on your server to the place where AppMail files are located, something like: /var/www/html/ or home/domain/public_html/ Code: # Campaign ...

    • What license do I need?

      AppMail is offered under two licenses, regular and extended. The regular license allows you to use AppMail for personal purposes, that is, for your website(s), where you don’t have any material win from directly using the application but only use the ...

    • Add a new delivery server type

      If you look in apps/common/models/ you will see lots of files called DeliveryServer{TYPE}.php where type is the provider they implement, for example DeliveryServerAmazonSesWebApi.php In order to create your own delivery server implementation, you ...

    • How to add delivery servers for an individual customer?

      You need to go to Backend > Settings > Customers and select the Servers tab. From this screen, select the number of delivery servers the customer is allowed to add, but also what type of delivery servers he is allowed to add. Once you do this, save ...