External mail server feature or delayed mail queue

[ssemerikov]

Dear Eddie,

I use HotCRP on the shared hosting with the strict limit of 100 emails per hour. When we have a lot of submissions before deadline, this limit is exceeded in a minutes. Another cases are notifications/reminders to the all (or some) of authors, review assignment et al, etc. The most of shared hosting providers allows to use the external mail servers (e.g., Gmail). Is it possible to make an 'externalMailer' option(s) in HotCRP, or 'maxlMailPerHour' option and the internal queue of delayed emails to avoid an 'emails-per-hour' restriction?

Kind regards,
Serhiy Semerikov

[kohler]

Hi,

I would certainly consider a patch to this effect; or you could use HotCRP.com.

Eddie

[Bramas]

Hi,
I faced the same problem when using it recently.
I think it will be hard to throttle the mail sending using php (except by having a long running script or a web page that refresh itself every second, sending 10 mail each time or something like that).

My solution was to use an intermediary SMTP server that send at most one mail per second. The SMTP server receives all the emails from hotcrp and keeps it in its queue until they are all sent.

I used docker-compose to set up my solution (inspired by the PR #140 )
The complete solution is available here : https://github.com/Bramas/hotcrp-docker-compose
With it, you can set up hotcrp easily as everything is pre-configured, setting the mail server you want to use and it will throttle 1 mail per second.

I am currently using it successfully for a conference (20 papers until now).

Quentin.