What is AutoCron?
Auto Cron is the best way to ensure the smooth sending of emails from your site using SendPress. It can be found under SendPress Settings > Sending Account. A single click will turn it on. The only disclaimer about enabling it is that it does allow us to track anonymous usage of SendPress such as the version of SendPress being used and the version of WordPress. We use that information to make SendPress even better.
Sites are checked every 15 minutes. It is even better than the WordPress Cron because it runs regardless of whether your site gets traffic or not.
If we discover that emails are in the queue when we check, the site is then checked again in 1 minute. This will continue for as long as the plugin reports emails still in the queue. After all messages are gone from the queue we drop our checks back to every 15 min
Keep in mind that the calculations below assume that your server is fast enough to achieve these rates. Additionally, very few hosting providers will allow sending at these rates. So even though a free user could potentially send 36,000 emails per day, mosts hosts would prevent it. The calculations for how many messages you CAN send per hour or per day are pretty straightforward (25 messages per minute * 60 minutes = 1500 messages per hour).
Recommended Settings for SendPress Free with Auto Cron enabled:
The max we recommend for Free users is 125 messages per hour or 3000* per day. To use these sending limits use the settings below. *** Always check with your hosting provider to determine how many messages they will allow you to send. ***
Recommended Settings for SendPress Pro with Auto Cron enabled:
Set emails per day to 36,000 and max rate to 1500 emails per hour to achieve 36,000 messages per day. *** Please note we recommend a 3rd Party API sending such as Mandrill API for high volumes***
Speed Up Sending
If your server can handle sending messages even faster than the default auto Cron settings, you can increase how fast you send under " Settings >Advanced". If you increase " emails sent per Autocron execution" from 25 to 50 for example, you will double your sending rate. The only caveat to changing the setting is that your server needs to be able to send that number of messages in a minute. If your server is not fast enough to send 50 messages in a minute for example, auto Cron will shut itself off and revert to the default settings.
Server Cron
If you'd like to set up your own cron on your server, you can have it access the SendPress Cron URL. Anytime the cron page is loaded, SendPress will execute a send. http://URL/wp-cron.php?action=sendpress Example: http://example.com/wp-cron.php?action=sendpress