I need to set up moodle cron on a system that was configured a while ago. Cron was not enabled when it was configured. There is about 6 months of backed up emails and notifications tied to cron that never went out. Is there a way to purge these before setting up cron so that mail only goes out starting now?
I have set up cron late in the game on a previous installation years ago and it unloaded a hellish backlog of emails to all users.
Do you imagine that altering the "last run" item for notifications and mailings in the Scheduled Tasks manager (in admin), for example: set last run to 'now', would cause the cron to skip everything scheduled prior to that?
Alternatively, would you be able to point me to which tables I should be looking at in the database?
If you're running Linux based servers you can kill your mail transport agent service - run moodlecron a few times and then re-enable the service
That should ensure mail does not get processed.
Redhat based systems:
service exim stop
Debian:
/etc/init.d/exim stop
replace exim with sendmail or postfix or your fav. mta program.
Windows Server w/ MS SQL. Mail is handled by an exchange server in a different department.
From what you say, though, it sounds like I could configure smtp settings to point to any invalid server and run cron, yes?
Yep that should work too!
Just one more thing to check and empty ... depending if there are messages that couldn't be delivered and are in a mailq on the server.
On CentOS running Sendmail (adjust for theOS/MTA you have), the que is in /var/spool/mqueue/
Any file in there is pertaining to a message that couldn't be sent. Remove them all:
from /var/spool/mqueue
rm -fR *
then list to see if there is anything in there: ls -l
Then restart the MTA daemon/process.
'spirit of sharing', Ken
