Invitation Mail Duplicates

Question

Hello! I am working on setting up a three part study where participants opt-in to mail list and during the first survey, a PHP code sets up the mail schedule using codes like this:

"mailSchedule(false, 5, strtotime('+182 days'));"

This should send my participant Mail 5 in 182 days. I did a test and when I look at the Invitation Mail schedule, I see that it has three lines indicating that it is going to send this mail to this person in 182 days at 17:01, 17:02, and 17:03.

I am not sure why it made two extra duplicates of the mail. Will it actually send three mails... each one second apart? Why did it do this and how can I fix it so that it just sends my participant one email (Mail 5) in 182 days?

Answer 1

Good news: No problem.

SoSci Survey will only once send each mailing to each address entry. So, if the mail was sent 17:01, no more mails will be sent 17:02 or 17:03.

Why did it do this

Most likely the page was shown multiple times. Either because you used the back button, or because some items were not answered. Therefore, the PHP code has run multiple times. If the timestamp was the same each time, SoSci Survey would have ignored that, but strtotime('+182 days') returns a different timestamp each time, so ... to be sure, SoSci Survey will schedule multiple times to send the mailing. Yet, as I wrote, it will stop after sending the first email to that person.