Unwanted mail blast sent by Scheduled Reminders
**BUG 1:**
I enabled a scheduled reminder which was configured to sent 12 week before the start date of an event.
The start date was a month ago on july 21st.
- Expected behavior: no mail is being sent.
- Actual behaviour: 500 families got an email with the last details on the event (that already happened).
Over the last few years we have had more incidents like these and it really hurts our reputation, and within our organization it also hurts the reputation of CiviCRM.
The scheduled reminders should be way more clear in configuration and unintentional mail blast should really be prevented by good tests and more solid code.
For this particular issue I would suggest to NOT send a reminder that is configured BEFORE an event, AFTER the event. This could be configured in Civi/ActionSchedule/RecipientBuilder.php although I lack the skills to figure out how.
BUG 2
Also what happened is that the reminder was configured for specific participant statuses and it ignored that and sent it anyway to participants with any status. Should be solved but also a test should be introduced for this.
BUG 3
The limit to group function seems (sometimes) to be ignored when sending to participants (selected by event type). Should be solved but also a test should be introduced for this.
CONCLUSION
I will further test on clean install, but to me this seems to be critical bugs as they
- have a reputation impact
- might impact spam ratings
- cause a lot of work to follow up (send rectifications, responding to responses by mail)...
....