Cron issue: Out of range value for column 'unsubscribe_total' at row 1

ruud

So just had a site where mails where queued but weren't send.
I checked the cron status: Acymailing reported that the cron triggered okay.

So I decided to run the cron url from the browser and immediately i was faced with the following error message:
Out of range value for column 'unsubscribe_total' at row 1

So I looked at table #__acym_mail_stat and found an entry there where the value for unsubscribe_total was 1073741824

unsubscribe_total being a field of type int(11) explains why this was giving the error.

replacing the high value with 0 solved the problem and The scheduled mails were sending again.

Now here are some observations:

the cron stranded with an error message: why is acymailing in configuration . queue reporting that the cron was successfully triggered? It is better to report there if the cron execution was successfull instead of triggered.
Why is the number of unsubscribe_total that high? My theses here is that a (hacker) bot just hits the site with the unsubscribe link trying to get it to overload or create other issues... which it did. If this is the case, then it would make sense to only unsubscribe a user once (!) instead of just count every visit of the unsubscribe link for that user.

Anyway, wanted to share here so that if others run into the same issue they maybe have a solution 🙂

regards,
Ruud.

mihha

Thank you for your post

I asked our developers to check this and possibly comment your findings

Dax

Hi,

unsubscribe_total contains the number of times someone unsubscribed from your email. It should never reach 1073M+ times.
There are multiple possible reasons:

Did you activate the bounce handling? If so, could you check if you have a bounce rule that unsubscribes the user without the "Delete the message from your mailbox" option checked?
Are you using Sendinblue as your sending method? There is a webhook that syncs the unsubscribe status of users.
Do you have an abnormal amount of people visiting your website in your server's access logs? There are securities in AcyMailing to ignore bots, but we may not catch 100% of them. If this is the case, could you give me the IP address and user agents used by these bots?

ruud

Dax
Thanks for following up:

no bounce handling enabled
using own mail server, so not sendinblue
no, and we monitor that closely.

for now I label it as an incident and will monitor the unsubscribed value to see if it again increases beyond the actual number of subscribers.

Leaves op the possible improvement take-away: the cron stopping due to the error should be visible in acymailing (or reported) as now we only found out after debugging and running the cron manually from a browser.