If you host a Typo3 installation at a provider where you don’t have shell access, need a custom cron job for the Typo3 scheduler and the host’s configuration interface (Plesk, for instance) is somehow cumbersome (for instance, it may limit your cron job to a chrooted shell and PHP isn’t installed the chroot environment, so you can’t start PHP scripts from there), you can try to install a Typo3 Web shell extension. Then check for existing cron jobs:

crontab -l

If you see some environment variable definitions, remember them. There may be a SHELL= restricting you to a chroot shell – in this case you may choose to remove this environment variable in your custom crontab. Now write your custom crontab, put it into fileadmin and call

crontab …

There are several traps when using Typo3 4.5 and the direct_mail newsletter extension with an external SMTP server. Here’s how to set it up:

First of all, prepare the SMTP server (for instance, by allowing the IP of the Web server as relay host or setting up user authentication).

In the Typo3 Install tool, set the [MAIL] settings correctly (transport=smtp, transport_smtp_server, defaultMailFromAddress and defaultMailFromName). To see if it works, send a mail from within the Install tool and check its headers (the SMTP server should be mentioned in a Received line).

As a dependency for direct_mail SMTP usage, you need PEAR::Mail with Net::SMTP support. Mail.php must be in the include path. Install it on your server, or if you only have a Webspace, put the necessary files into a /pear directory and add this directory to the include_path. Check whether it works using a modified …