Magento 1.9.1 Emails

6th April 2016

As of Magento 1.9.1, all e-mails (including order confirmation and transactional) are now queued and sent via a cron schedule. If you have the AOE Scheduler extension installed, you will be able to view the status of the scheduled tasks configured in Magento. The task that is responsible for email queuing can be found within the admin under System -> Scheduler. It is named core_email_queue_send_all.

If you’re getting a No heartbeat task found. Check if cron is configured correctly. notice at the top of the page, more than likely the Magento cron hasn’t been configure correctly (or at all) on your web server.

If you have access to cPanel, Plesk or some other kind of login to your server, locate the Cron Jobs or Scheduled Tasks area, and add the following command.

*/2 * * * * /bin/sh /your/website/root/cron.sh

Note that you can also use php commands, as blank Magento installations come with both cron.php and cron.sh files.

*/2 * * * * php /your/website/root/cron.php

Please note that since the release of the SUPEE-6788 security patch, access to cron.php via HTTP calls is forbidden, as the following lines in the .htaccess demonstrate.

## Deny access to cron.php
    <Files cron.php>

############################################
## uncomment next lines to enable cron access with base HTTP authorization
## http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/auth.html
##
## Warning: .htpasswd file should be placed somewhere not accessible from the web.
## This is so that folks cannot download the password file.
## For example, if your documents are served out of /usr/local/apache/htdocs
## you might want to put the password file(s) in /usr/local/apache/.

        #AuthName "Cron auth"
        #AuthUserFile ../.htpasswd
        #AuthType basic
        #Require valid-user

############################################

        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all

    </Files>

Therefore, if you are using http calls to run cron, it is recommended to change to using the shell command via the cron.sh file.

Note: This article is based on Magento Community/Open Source version 1.9.1.