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Every morning at ServMe IT | Wazuh Reporting | System Monitoring

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Email Hosting | Microsoft 365 Email

ServMe IT has had a question from a customer using cPanel for his email accounts. He wants to migrate to Microsoft so he can use Teams and Calendar, but he wants to keep some of his emails in cPanel.

Problem

A customer has used several business emails just for logging in to various websites. The emails do not send and receive email, but may be required for password resets. As the address isn’t used as a “live” mailbox, the customer doesn’t want to purchase licenses from Microsoft to keep the address. Is there a way of doing this for free?

Answer

The simple answer is yes.

The bigger question is, should we try configure two hosting providers with the one business domain, or can we do this with Microsoft alone?

The answer is, we can do it either way. It is much higher risk using two providers as there is a complex configuration we would need to go through to ensure mail is routed to the correct provider, depending on the email address used.

This is achieved using:

  • Microsoft 365 as the primary mail server (MX records point to Microsoft)
  • Mail flow connectors in Exchange Online
  • Shared domain configuration
  • Forwarding / routing rules between Microsoft and cPanel

Microsoft calls this a “shared email domain” or hybrid mail routing.

This works, but:

  • More complex to set up
  • More difficult to troubleshoot
  • Can cause mail loops if configured incorrectly

I generally only recommend this when a customer is migrating gradually.

I would like to move my emails

to Microsoft 365 Business
Email Support

Preferred Solution

Move Everything to Microsoft 365 (Recommended)

This is usually the best solution if the customer wants:

  • Microsoft Teams
  • Shared calendars
  • Outlook integration
  • OneDrive
  • SharePoint
  • Exchange Online email

In this setup:

  • Email is hosted in Microsoft 365.
  • The domain’s MX records point to Microsoft.
  • cPanel email accounts are migrated and then retired.

This gives the cleanest experience and avoids mail routing issues.

The “inactive” Mailbox Solution

How do we then handle our “unused” email addresses?

The Shared Mailbox

A common trick is:

  1. Create a licensed user mailbox (e.g. info@company.co.nz).
  2. Convert it to a Shared Mailbox.
  3. Remove the licence.

The mailbox continues to work as a Shared Mailbox provided:

  • It stays under 50 GB.
  • No Exchange Online Archive is required.
  • Nobody logs in directly to the mailbox.

Users with their own licensed accounts can then access the shared mailbox.

If they want:

and each person has their own login, Outlook, Teams and Calendar, then each user needs a licence such as:

  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic, or
  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard

Example

A common setup is:

Mailbox Licence
grant@servmeit.co.nz Business Standard
accounts@servmeit.co.nz Shared Mailbox
support@servmeit.co.nz Shared Mailbox
sales@servmeit.co.nz Shared Mailbox

 

That gives you one paid licence and multiple departmental addresses.

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Get Started with your own web hosting

  • Ready to register a domain or set up hosting for your business?

Visit billing.servmeit.co.nz to get started, or contact us if you’d like to discuss your requirements.

Websites | Developed by ServMeIT | Gateway Travel Sydney Australia

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Gateway Travel Sydney Australia

Gateway Travel, Sydney Australia, is a website I’ve built on Wordpress using the Themify Ultra Theme. Originally called Russian Travel and Tours, it was rebranded after Russian went to war with Ukraine.

Check it out here

GatewayTravel.com.au

A Single Place to Manage Everything

Our new client portal at billing.servmeit.co.nz lets you register domains, purchase hosting, view invoices and manage your services — all in one place. Payments are accepted via credit card (Stripe) or PayPal, and invoices include New Zealand or Australian GST.

Built on Open Source

Our billing platform runs on FOSSBilling, a free and open-source billing system.

As part of setting this up, we built a custom integration module connecting FOSSBilling to TPP Wholesale — and we’ve released it publicly for other NZ hosting businesses to use.

You can find it here on GitHub.

Check it out

our own FOSSBilling TPP Wholesale module
Click here for GitHub

Get Started

  • Ready to register a domain or set up hosting for your business?

Visit billing.servmeit.co.nz to get started, or contact us if you’d like to discuss your requirements.

AirWallex

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What Is Airwallex?

Most NZ and AU businesses that start trading overseas hit the same wall: their bank’s foreign exchange rates are expensive, international transfers are slow, and getting a card that actually works in multiple currencies means opening yet another account somewhere else. Airwallex was built to solve exactly that problem — one platform for holding, converting, spending and receiving money in dozens of currencies, instead of stitching together a business bank account, a forex broker and a card provider.

Airwallex is a global financial platform that gives businesses local currency accounts in 20+ currencies, international transfers to more than 200 countries, multi-currency Visa cards, and payment acceptance across 160+ local payment methods — all from one dashboard. It’s aimed at businesses that pay overseas suppliers, get paid by overseas customers, or manage remote teams and spend across borders, and it connects directly to accounting platforms like Xero, QuickBooks and NetSuite so the finance side doesn’t become a second job.

Check out AirWallex

Financial management in one place
Click to find out more

What Stands Out

  • Interbank-rate FX, not bank-rate FX. Airwallex charges a fixed markup over the interbank exchange rate — around 0.5% on major currencies and 1% on the rest — rather than the wider, often opaque margins big banks build into their rates. On regular international payments that difference adds up fast.
  • Local accounts in 20+ currencies. Instead of paying international wire fees every time, you can hold and receive funds in USD, GBP, EUR and other major currencies as if you had a local account in that country.
  • Multi-currency cards on demand. Issue physical and virtual Visa cards for the business and for employees, spend in the currency you’re billed in, and skip the double conversion that happens when a NZD or AUD card is charged overseas.
  • Built-in spend and expense management. Expense tracking, employee reimbursements, bill pay and purchase order controls sit inside the same platform, with AI-assisted tools for matching receipts and processing invoices — genuinely useful if you’re currently doing this in a spreadsheet.
  • No-code payment acceptance. Payment links and checkout pages let you accept international payments across 130+ currencies without a developer, which matters for smaller teams that don’t have one on hand.

Where to Be Cautious

  • Pricing is tiered, and the free plan has strings attached. Entry-level access is typically free only if you meet a minimum monthly deposit or balance threshold; heavier features like advanced expense management sit behind paid plans, so check current NZD/AUD pricing against your actual usage before committing.
  • SWIFT transfers still cost money. Local-rail transfers to 120+ countries are free, but traditional SWIFT wires attract a per-transfer fee — cheaper than most banks, but not zero.
  • No forward contracts. If your business needs to lock in an exchange rate ahead of a large future payment to manage currency risk, Airwallex doesn’t currently offer hedging tools — you’ll still need a specialist FX provider for that.
  • Airwallex is not a registered bank. Like most fintech payment platforms, it operates under money services/EMI-style licensing rather than banking licences, and fund safeguarding arrangements differ from standard bank deposit protection. Worth reading the current terms for your region before moving large balances across.
  • Onboarding takes real verification. Expect to provide business documentation and ID, with account approval typically taking one to three working days rather than instant sign-up.

Airwallex makes the most sense

for NZ and AU businesses that regularly send or receive money overseas
FREE TO SIGNUP

Who It’s Built For

Airwallex makes the most sense for NZ and AU businesses that regularly send or receive money overseas: importers and exporters, SaaS and ecommerce businesses invoicing international customers, agencies paying overseas contractors, and any business tired of watching bank FX margins eat into margin on every international transaction. If your business is purely domestic with no foreign currency exposure, most of the platform’s value won’t apply to you.

The Bottom Line

Airwallex isn’t trying to be a full replacement for your everyday business bank account — it’s a purpose-built tool for the international side of running a business, and it does that well. The FX pricing is genuinely competitive against what most NZ and AU banks charge, the multi-currency accounts and cards remove a lot of manual conversion pain, and the Xero integration means it slots into an existing setup rather than replacing it. For a business with real cross-border payments, it’s well worth a look; for one that never sends money offshore, it’s not going to move the needle.

If you want to see if it fits your setup

Check out AirWallex here!!
Click here !!

Disclosure: ServMe IT is a PartnerStack affiliate for Airwallex. If you sign up through the links in this post, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we’ve researched and believe can genuinely help NZ and AU businesses grow.

ServMe IT helps NZ and AU businesses with IT support, hosting, and the software stack that keeps them running. We test and recommend tools like Airwallex because we use similar principles ourselves — consolidate where it makes sense, and only pay for what actually saves you time.

AmpleMarket

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AmpleMarket Review: Is This AI Sales Platform Worth It for B2B Teams in 2026?

If you’re running outbound sales — whether that’s a two-person startup trying to book its first ten demos, or a growing revenue team juggling five different prospecting tools — you’ve probably felt the pain of stitching together a lead list, a data enrichment tool, an email sender, and a LinkedIn automation app just to have one coherent outreach motion.

Amplemarket is one of a new wave of “all-in-one” AI sales platforms trying to solve exactly that problem. We looked into what it actually does, who it’s built for, and where it falls short, so you can decide whether it’s worth adding to your stack.

Get started for Free

Lead search, data enrichment, intent signals, and multichannel outreach in one
Click to find out more

What Is Amplemarket?

Amplemarket is an AI-powered sales engagement platform that combines lead search, data enrichment, intent signals, and multichannel outreach (email, LinkedIn, phone, WhatsApp, and iMessage) into one system. Instead of paying separately for a data provider, a sequencing tool, and a deliverability monitor, the pitch is that Amplemarket replaces all of them.

At the centre of the platform is Duo, Amplemarket’s AI copilot, which handles a few different jobs:

  • Duo Copywriter — drafts hyper-personalised outreach messages based on a prospect’s role, company, and recent activity.
  • Duo Inbox — helps manage and prioritise replies across channels in one place.
  • Duo Voice — supports AI-assisted calling workflows.

Around Duo sits the core toolkit: a prospect Searcher with detailed filtering, intent signals that flag when a person or company is showing active buying behaviour, job-change alerts, competitive intelligence, and built-in deliverability tools (domain health monitoring and email warmup) so your outbound doesn’t end up in spam.

What Stands Out

Data quality on phone numbers. Independent reviewers have found Amplemarket’s phone-number accuracy sits around 90%, noticeably ahead of some well-known competitors that hover closer to 65%. For teams doing any cold or warm calling, that difference alone can save hours of dialling dead numbers.

Lead-level intent, not just company-level. A lot of intent-data tools tell you “Company X is in-market.” Amplemarket goes a layer deeper and tries to identify which specific person at that company is showing buying signals — which makes prioritisation and personalisation easier.

True multichannel in one workflow. Email, LinkedIn, phone, WhatsApp and iMessage sequencing from a single tool means less tab-switching and fewer integration headaches between separate point solutions.

Built-in deliverability protection. Domain and mailbox health monitoring is baked in rather than being a separate paid add-on, which matters a lot once you’re sending outbound at any real volume.

Human + AI

Empower reps, uncover opportunities, and grow revenue with an all-in-one AI platform
FREE TO SIGNUP

Where to Be Cautious

To keep this balanced, a few things are worth knowing before you commit:

  • Pricing isn’t public, and reviewers estimate costs from roughly $600/month on the entry tier up to five figures a month for enterprise plans, with contact access run on a credit system that can make monthly spend harder to predict.
  • Annual contracts only — there’s currently no month-to-month option, so it’s a bigger commitment than a lot of point tools.
  • Some users report deliverability issues at scale despite the built-in tools, and a portion of the 220M+ contact database can be out of date, which is a common issue across this category of product.
  • There’s a learning curve. The platform is genuinely feature-rich, and getting full value out of Duo and the automation workflows takes real setup time.

Because of the pricing and contract structure, Amplemarket tends to make the most sense for mid-market and growing revenue teams with a dedicated SDR or RevOps function, rather than a solo founder sending twenty emails a week. If that’s you, a lighter-weight tool might be a better starting point — but if you’re scaling an outbound motion and currently paying for three or four separate tools to do what Amplemarket does in one, the consolidation could easily pay for itself.

Who It’s Built For

Amplemarket markets itself to a fairly wide range of sales use cases:

  • Individual SDRs and account executives wanting AI-assisted personalisation at scale
  • Sales leaders and RevOps teams trying to consolidate their stack and get cleaner reporting
  • Founders and early-stage teams building their first repeatable outbound motion
  • Marketing teams layering intent data into their campaigns

The Bottom Line

  • Amplemarket isn’t the cheapest tool on the market, and the annual-only pricing means it’s a real commitment rather than something to trial casually. But the combination of strong data accuracy, lead-level intent signals, genuine multichannel outreach, and built-in deliverability protection is a compelling package if outbound is a serious growth lever for your business — and it can replace several separate subscriptions in the process.

    If your team is spending more time managing tools than actually selling, it’s worth a proper look.

Check out AmpleMarket

and start your FREE trial
Click here !!

Disclosure: ServMe IT is a PartnerStack affiliate for Amplemarket. If you sign up through the links in this post, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we’ve researched and believe can genuinely help NZ and AU businesses grow.

ServMe IT helps NZ and AU businesses with IT support, hosting, and the software stack that keeps them running. We test and recommend tools like Amplemarket because we use similar principles ourselves — consolidate where it makes sense, and only pay for what actually saves you time.

Foxit

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Foxit PDF Editor: The Adobe Acrobat Alternative Kiwi Small Businesses Should Know About

If you run a small business, chances are PDFs are part of your daily grind — signing contracts, sending invoices, filling in forms, editing scanned documents. And chances are, you’re either paying through the nose for Adobe Acrobat, or cobbling together free tools that don’t quite do the job.

We work with small and medium businesses across New Zealand every day, helping them get their IT setup running smoothly without the enterprise price tag. One of the software swaps we recommend most often is moving from Adobe Acrobat to Foxit PDF Editor — and here’s why.

Disclosure: ServMe IT is an affiliate partner of Foxit. If you sign up through the links in this article, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we use ourselves and would genuinely put in front of our own clients.

Get started for Free

Check out Foxit
Click to find out more

What is Foxit PDF Editor?

Foxit PDF Editor is a full-featured PDF application that covers everything most businesses actually need: creating, editing, converting, signing, and organising PDF documents. It’s built to feel familiar if you’ve used Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Office before, so there’s very little learning curve for your team.

Core features include:

  • Full document editing — add, remove, and rearrange text, images, and pages directly in a PDF, not just annotations on top of it
  • PDF conversion — convert to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPG, and HTML
  • Built-in eSignature — send and sign documents without a separate app or subscription
  • Form filling and creation — build fillable forms for client intake, HR, or compliance
  • OCR and scanning — turn scanned paper documents into searchable, editable PDFs in 40+ languages
  • Redaction tools — permanently remove sensitive information before sharing a document externally
  • AI Assistant — summarise long documents, extract key information, and search across your PDFs using plain-language queries
  • Microsoft 365 integration — a native ribbon inside Word, Excel, and Outlook so you never have to leave the app you’re already working in

For a business that just needs solid, reliable PDF tools — not a full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription — it covers the bases without the bloat.

Foxit vs Adobe Acrobat: the real difference is cost

Feature-for-feature, Foxit and Adobe Acrobat are close. Both handle editing, redaction, OCR, and eSignatures. Both meet standard compliance requirements businesses ask about, like HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR. Where they really diverge is price and licensing flexibility.

Adobe Acrobat Pro for Teams typically runs in the vicinity of $260+ per user, per year, tied to named-user, cloud-based licensing. Foxit PDF Editor Pro comes in noticeably cheaper — commonly 40–50% less over the course of a year — and offers both per-seat and volume licensing that isn’t locked to a single named user. For a business with five, ten, or fifty staff, that difference adds up fast, and it’s easier to manage as your headcount changes.

Foxit also gives you the choice of a one-off perpetual licence, or an annual or monthly subscription — so you’re not forced into the ongoing subscription model if you’d rather pay once and own it.

If your team already lives inside Adobe Creative Cloud for design work, or you have existing Adobe Sign workflows baked into your business, there’s a case for sticking with Acrobat. But for most small businesses whose PDF needs are “edit it, sign it, send it” — not high-end design — Foxit gets the job done for a lot less money, with an interface close enough to Acrobat’s that your team won’t miss a beat.

SMB Solutions

For most small businesses whose PDF needs are “edit it, sign it, send it” — not high-end design — Foxit gets the job done for a lot less money
FREE TO SIGNUP

Why we recommend it to our clients

As an MSP, we’re picky about what software we put our name behind. A few reasons Foxit ends up on our recommended list:

  1. Lower total cost of ownership. Less pressure on your software budget without cutting functionality your staff actually use day to day.
  2. Minimal retraining. The layout is familiar enough that most people are productive within minutes, not days.
  3. Flexible licensing. Volume and per-seat options mean the plan can actually match how your business is structured, rather than forcing you into Adobe’s model.
  4. Fast rollout. Migrating a small team off Acrobat and onto Foxit typically takes about a business week, including checking any document workflows still behave as expected.
  5. It plays nicely with the rest of your stack, including Microsoft 365, which is where most of the small businesses we support already do their day-to-day work.

Getting started

  • If PDF software is quietly costing your business more than it should, it’s worth a look. You can try Foxit PDF Editor free and see the pricing options here.

    And if you’d like a hand working out which plan fits your team, how licensing would work across your business, or want us to handle the rollout so nobody loses a day to “why won’t this open” — that’s exactly the kind of thing ServMe IT sorts out for clients. Get in touch with us and we’ll help you get set up.

PDF Software you can afford

Free to signup now and find out more
Click here !!

Disclosure: ServMe IT is a PartnerStack affiliate for Foxit. If you sign up through the links in this post, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we’ve researched and believe can genuinely help NZ and AU businesses grow.

ServMe IT helps NZ and AU businesses with IT support, hosting, and the software stack that keeps them running. We test and recommend tools like Foxit because we use similar principles ourselves — consolidate where it makes sense, and only pay for what actually saves you time.

System Monitoring | AI Reporting | Daily Routine

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Customer System Monitoring

ServMe IT takes pride in the fact our System Monitoring tools are amongst the best in the world. We are also actively using AI to manage our system monitoring, which means nothing falls through the cracks. Each morning, we have a routine which ensures any issues found in the last 24 hours are actioned. Here’s a blog article showing you just what this looks like.

How We Use Wazuh and AI to Turn 15,000 Security Events Into a Two-Minute Read

Every morning, before most of our clients have opened their laptops, our infrastructure has already logged somewhere upwards of ten thousand security events. SSH scanners probing for weak passwords. Bots poking at old backup files. Routine Windows housekeeping. The occasional real finding buried somewhere in the middle of it all.

The hard part of cybersecurity monitoring was never collecting that data. Tools have been doing that well for years. The hard part is turning it into something a human being can actually read, understand, and act on before their coffee goes cold. That’s the problem we set out to solve with our own infrastructure first, before rolling the same approach out to client environments.

The tool

Wazuh is an open-source security monitoring platform — part SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), part host-based intrusion detection, part vulnerability scanner. It sits as an agent on each server or workstation we manage, watching for things like failed logins, file integrity changes, new vulnerabilities in installed software, and suspicious patterns in web server and system logs. It’s genuinely good at its job.

It’s also, out of the box, extremely noisy. A single day of normal, healthy operation across a handful of servers generates thousands of log lines — most of them routine, a few of them worth a second look, and a rare few that need action today. Reading that raw feed every morning isn’t a sustainable way to run a security practice, for us or for anyone.

Learn more about how

ServMe IT can monitor all your systems
Email Support

The problem: signal buried in noise

Here’s a taste of what a single 24-hour window can look like, based on a recent report from our own internal infrastructure (server names, IP addresses, and account names below have been changed to generic examples — this isn’t our real network):

  • Roughly 4,000 combined SSH login attempts against one server, mostly automated bots trying the root account or guessing usernames
  • Over 5,000 hits from web recon bots probing for exposed .env files, old PHP info pages, and backup files
  • Nearly 800 routine Windows registry and file-integrity events on a single, monitored workstation
  • Two newly disclosed CVEs picked up by the vulnerability scanner
  • One changed crontab entry, one denied sudo attempt, and one flagged “bot-like” traffic pattern that turned out to be a monitoring dashboard refreshing itself

None of that is unusual for an internet-facing server in 2026 — background scanning is just the ambient noise of being connected to the internet. But somewhere in a list that long, there might be one line that actually matters. Finding it manually, every single day, doesn’t scale.

The fix: AI as a triage layer, not a replacement for judgment

This is where we layer AI on top of Wazuh, rather than relying on either tool alone. Each morning, an automated process pulls the last 24 hours of Wazuh alerts and runs them through an AI summarization step before a human ever looks at it. The AI’s job isn’t to make security decisions — it’s to do the sorting that would otherwise eat an hour, or more, of an analyst’s morning: grouping related events, recognizing routine patterns (a certificate renewal cron job, a scheduled package update, a dashboard polling its own server), and surfacing anything that breaks that pattern.

The output lands in three tiers:

Urgent — anything that would justify getting a phone call, like a successful unauthorized login, a critical file integrity violation, or a remotely exploitable vulnerability on something internet-facing. On a good day, and most days, this section is empty. That’s the point.

Action — findings worth a human decision, but not a fire drill. Not “nothing happened,” but “someone should look at this and confirm it’s expected.”

Information — the routine background noise, kept visible for anyone who wants it, but explicitly separated so it doesn’t drown out anything that matters.

What an “Action” item actually looks like

To make this concrete, here’s an anonymized excerpt from one of our own daily reports, with real hostnames, IP addresses, and account names swapped for generic examples:

Time Host Finding Detail
07:10 vms.servmeit.co.nz New CVE detected (High severity) Vulnerability found in an installed package; requires a local trigger to exploit, not remotely exploitable — added to the patch watch-list rather than treated as urgent
14:11 vms.servmeit.co.nz Repeated SSH login attempts using root Blocked automatically by server configuration; no successful login
04:35 vms.servmeit.co.nz Root’s scheduled-task list was modified Consistent with a routine certificate renewal job — flagged so a human can confirm it was expected
01:43 vms.servmeit.co.nz Denied sudo attempt by a non-admin account Access correctly denied by permissions; worth confirming the account itself is still expected to exist
04:48 vms.servmeit.co.nz Scanning for exposed backup and config files 106 probe attempts from roughly a dozen source addresses (e.g. 203.0.113.14, 198.51.100.77); all returned “access denied” — nothing exposed


And, just as usefully, here’s what the AI correctly filtered out of the urgent conversation: a “high volume of automated-looking requests” alert that traced back to an internal monitoring dashboard on our own network refreshing itself every few seconds — a textbook false positive that a purely rules-based alert would have flagged as suspicious traffic. Recognizing “this is us, doing something normal” is exactly the kind of triage that saves a security team from chasing its own tail.

Check it out our other Blogs

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Why this matters for a small or medium business

Most SMBs don’t have — and shouldn’t need — a dedicated security operations team staring at dashboards all day. But “we don’t have a SOC” shouldn’t mean “we don’t know what’s happening on our network.” A daily report that’s genuinely readable in two minutes, that tells you plainly whether anything needs your attention today, and that doesn’t cry wolf over routine background scanning, is the middle ground most businesses actually need.

We built this for our own infrastructure first because we weren’t willing to hand a client something we hadn’t trusted with our own systems. Now that the process has proven itself day after day — catching real findings, correctly ignoring the noise, and staying honest about what it doesn’t know — we’re extending the same Wazuh-plus-AI daily reporting to client environments as part of our managed IT and hosting services.

Every daily report we generate is filed away permanently in our internal knowledge base, so there’s always a full, searchable history to look back on if something needs investigating down the track. Customers don’t need to read a report like this every single day, though — instead, we roll the week’s findings up into a single plain-English summary that’s shared at the end of each week (if you wish), so you get the full picture without the noise.

If you’d like to know what this would look like for your own business — what’s currently scanning your servers, what’s routine, and what actually deserves a phone call — get in touch with ServMe IT.

Find out more

about your systems and how we can secure them
Email Support

Interestedin hosting your own website?

  • Ready to register a domain or set up website and email hosting for your business?

Visit billing.servmeit.co.nz to get started, or contact us if you’d like to discuss your requirements.

SuiteCRM Cron & Scheduler Setup

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Solving Cron & Scheduler issues in SuitCRM

Critical Setup Checklist

SuiteCRM actually needs two separate cron entries, not one — most guides (including SuiteCRM’s own on-screen instructions) only mention the legacy one, which silently leaves some jobs permanently broken.

Legacy cron entry — runs cron.php, handles most jobs (function::... style)

Modern console entry — runs bin/console schedulers:run, handles scheduler::... style jobs — without this, “Queue Campaign Emails” and “Send Campaign Emails” never run, ever, with no error shown anywhere

The two entries must be staggered (not fired at the exact same moment) or the second one silently throttles itself out every cycle

allowed_cron_users in config.php must list both the OS cron user and the SuiteCRM application scheduler user

Any scheduler’s date_time_start must stay at the generic 2015-01-01 value — never a real date

Configuration Steps

Step 1 — The Crontab

Edit the Cron using
sudo crontab -e -u user1
Add the following lines near the bottom
* * * * * sleep 30; cd /var/www/[path] && php bin/console schedulers:run > /dev/null 2>&1

Why both are needed at all: SuiteCRM’s legacy cron.php scheduler-selection query contains:

job NOT LIKE ‘%scheduler::%’

Step 2 — allowed_cron_users

Edit the config.php
sudo nano /var/www/[path]/public/legacy/config.php
 
‘cron’ =>
   array (
      ‘max_cron_jobs’ => 10,
      ‘max_cron_runtime’ => 30,
      ‘min_cron_interval’ => 30,
      ‘allowed_cron_users’ =>
     array (
        0 => ‘user1’,
        1 => ‘user2’,
     ),
   ),
  • user1 — the Linux/OS-level cron user (matches the crontab owner)
  • user2 — the SuiteCRM application-level scheduler username (shown in Admin → Schedulers → “Last user to run schedulers”)

These are two different types of usernames, both required in the same array. If a scheduler shows “This user is not part of allowed_cron_users config setting”, this is the fix.

No service restart needed — config.php is read fresh on each request/cron run. Run Admin → Repair → Quick Repair and Rebuild if changes don’t seem to take effect.

Step 3 — Verify It’s Actually Working

Don’t trust the Admin → Schedulers summary page alone — it can show stale/misleading “Last successful run” data. Check the database directly.

Check all schedulers’ real last-run times:

SELECT name, job_interval, date_time_start, last_run FROM schedulers ORDER BY last_run DESC;

Check individual job execution history (not “schedulers_jobs” — that table doesn’t exist):

SELECT id, name, status, resolution, execute_time, failure_count FROM job_queue WHERE name LIKE ‘%Mass Email%’ ORDER BY execute_time DESC LIMIT 10;
 
sudo -u user1 php bin/console schedulers:run
Send Campaign Emails (Passed)
Queue Campaign Emails (Passed)
If it instead says ERROR [app] Jobs run too frequently, throttled to protect the system / No Schedulers to run, you’ve just run it within 30 seconds of the last automatic cron tick — wait and try again, or check the stagger in Step 1.

SuiteCRM

Document Library
Click here

Common Mistakes & Symptoms

Symptom Cause Fix
“Last user to run schedulers… this user is not part of allowed_cron_users“ App-level scheduler user missing from config.php Add the app-level username (e.g. user2) to allowed_cron_users alongside the OS user
A scheduler’s “Last Successful Run” frozen at one exact timestamp, forever, despite Active status and correct interval date_time_start was set to a real date instead of the generic 2015-01-01 value (usually from an accidental edit via the UI’s date/time start field) UPDATE schedulers SET date_time_start='2015-01-01 HH:MM:01' WHERE name='...'; — match what every other scheduler uses
“Run Nightly Mass Email Campaigns” (or similar) shows job_queue status=success repeatedly, but nothing real ever happens The scheduler’s own eligibility check is silently failing (e.g. a date-parsing error) before it ever reaches your actual data — success is only reported for the outer dispatch wrapper Temporarily set config.php‘s log level to debug, force a run, grep the log for ERROR/did NOT find valid job lines, then revert log level to fatal
“Queue Campaign Emails” / “Send Campaign Emails” show last_run frozen at one old date, forever, *::*::*::*::* interval, Active status Legacy cron.php structurally excludes scheduler::-prefixed jobs (see Step 1) Add the staggered bin/console schedulers:run crontab entry
An Email Marketing record’s own status gets permanently stuck at active or sending, never progressing The run that set that status was interrupted mid-batch (e.g. crashed on an unrelated broken record elsewhere in the send queue) before it could complete or revert Check SELECT status FROM email_marketing WHERE id='...' directly. If stuck at active/sending with no real activity, reset back to pending_send (back up the table first) and let a fresh cron cycle pick it up
A [FATAL] Error retrieving template for the email campaign loop, same marketing_id repeating endlessly every cycle An old/completed Email Marketing record has a blank or invalid template_id, and its leftover emailman queue rows never got cleared — the send function hits this broken record on every pass and exits before reaching genuine new work Find the broken record: check its template_id. Soft-delete its stuck emailman rows: UPDATE emailman SET deleted=1 WHERE marketing_id='...';
Inbound mailbox (support@, bounces@) shows AUTHENTICATIONFAILED every cron cycle Stored password in SuiteCRM doesn’t match the actual mailbox password Re-enter password in Admin → Inbound Email, use Test Settings before saving
Email Reminder: error sending email, system smtp server is not set every cycle System-level Outbound Email account (Admin → Email Settings) never configured Fill in real SMTP details on the “system” Outbound Email Account, enable “Users may send as this account’s identity” if needed

Database Reference

Useful tables for diagnosing scheduler/cron issues (always DESCRIBE tablename; first — don’t guess column names):

Table Purpose
schedulers Scheduler definitions: interval, status, last_run, date_time_start
job_queue Individual execution attempts/results for scheduled jobs (status, resolution, execute_time)
emailman Individual queued campaign emails, one row per recipient per send
campaign_log Per-recipient campaign activity (targeted, sent, viewed, blocked-opted-out, blocked-duplicate-email, etc.)
email_marketing One row per campaign send instance (status, template_id, date_start)
email_marketing_prospect_lists Links an Email Marketing record to its Target List(s)
prospect_list_campaigns Links a Target List to a Campaign
prospect_lists_prospects Actual membership of a Target List (related_id, related_type)

ServMe Webs | Domain Registration | Hosting | Billing Copy

ServMe Webs
Domain Registration | Hosting | Billing

ServMe IT has been quietly building out its infrastructure over the past few months, and we’re pleased to announce that several new services are now available for Australian and New Zealand businesses.

Domain Registrations

We are now an authorised reseller of domain names through TPP Wholesale, one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading domain registrars. You can now register and manage your .co.nz, .nz, .com.au, .au and .com domains directly through ServMe IT.

Pricing starts from $29.95 per year for .co.nz domains — competitive with the major providers, and backed by local support you can actually reach.

Register your domain at billing.servmeit.co.nz.

Looking for more domains, check out our other services at:

nzstore.servmedomains.co.nz

austore.servmedomains.co.nz

Web Hosting

Alongside domain registration, we now offer website hosting on our own New Zealand-based server infrastructure. Our hosting is built on ISPmanager, a professional-grade hosting control panel used by hosting providers worldwide.

Starter hosting plans begin at $9.95 per month, including email hosting and SSL certificates.

Set me up now!!

I want my own domain
Click register

A Single Place to Manage Everything

Our new client portal at billing.servmeit.co.nz lets you register domains, purchase hosting, view invoices and manage your services — all in one place. Payments are accepted via credit card (Stripe) or PayPal, and invoices include New Zealand or Australian GST.

Built on Open Source

Our billing platform runs on FOSSBilling, a free and open-source billing system.

As part of setting this up, we built a custom integration module connecting FOSSBilling to TPP Wholesale — and we’ve released it publicly for other NZ hosting businesses to use.

You can find it here on GitHub.

Check it out

our own FOSSBilling TPP Wholesale module
Click here for GitHub

Get Started

  • Ready to register a domain or set up hosting for your business?

Visit billing.servmeit.co.nz to get started, or contact us if you’d like to discuss your requirements.

Microsoft 365 Email | Migrating Emails | Rehosting Email

,

Email Hosting | Microsoft 365 Email

ServMe IT has had a question from a customer using cPanel for his email accounts. He wants to migrate to Microsoft so he can use Teams and Calendar, but he wants to keep some of his emails in cPanel.

Problem

A customer has used several business emails just for logging in to various websites. The emails do not send and receive email, but may be required for password resets. As the address isn’t used as a “live” mailbox, the customer doesn’t want to purchase licenses from Microsoft to keep the address. Is there a way of doing this for free?

Answer

The simple answer is yes.

The bigger question is, should we try configure two hosting providers with the one business domain, or can we do this with Microsoft alone?

The answer is, we can do it either way. It is much higher risk using two providers as there is a complex configuration we would need to go through to ensure mail is routed to the correct provider, depending on the email address used.

This is achieved using:

  • Microsoft 365 as the primary mail server (MX records point to Microsoft)
  • Mail flow connectors in Exchange Online
  • Shared domain configuration
  • Forwarding / routing rules between Microsoft and cPanel

Microsoft calls this a “shared email domain” or hybrid mail routing.

This works, but:

  • More complex to set up
  • More difficult to troubleshoot
  • Can cause mail loops if configured incorrectly

I generally only recommend this when a customer is migrating gradually.

I would like to move my emails

to Microsoft 365 Business
Email Support

Preferred Solution

Move Everything to Microsoft 365 (Recommended)

This is usually the best solution if the customer wants:

  • Microsoft Teams
  • Shared calendars
  • Outlook integration
  • OneDrive
  • SharePoint
  • Exchange Online email

In this setup:

  • Email is hosted in Microsoft 365.
  • The domain’s MX records point to Microsoft.
  • cPanel email accounts are migrated and then retired.

This gives the cleanest experience and avoids mail routing issues.

The “inactive” Mailbox Solution

How do we then handle our “unused” email addresses?

The Shared Mailbox

A common trick is:

  1. Create a licensed user mailbox (e.g. info@company.co.nz).
  2. Convert it to a Shared Mailbox.
  3. Remove the licence.

The mailbox continues to work as a Shared Mailbox provided:

  • It stays under 50 GB.
  • No Exchange Online Archive is required.
  • Nobody logs in directly to the mailbox.

Users with their own licensed accounts can then access the shared mailbox.

If they want:

and each person has their own login, Outlook, Teams and Calendar, then each user needs a licence such as:

  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic, or
  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard

Example

A common setup is:

Mailbox Licence
grant@servmeit.co.nz Business Standard
accounts@servmeit.co.nz Shared Mailbox
support@servmeit.co.nz Shared Mailbox
sales@servmeit.co.nz Shared Mailbox

 

That gives you one paid licence and multiple departmental addresses.

Check it out our other Blogs

Show me more

Get Started with your own web hosting

  • Ready to register a domain or set up hosting for your business?

Visit billing.servmeit.co.nz to get started, or contact us if you’d like to discuss your requirements.

ServMe Webs | Domain Registration | Hosting | Billing

, ,

ServMe Webs
Domain Registration | Hosting | Billing

ServMe IT has been quietly building out its infrastructure over the past few months, and we’re pleased to announce that several new services are now available for Australian and New Zealand businesses.

Domain Registrations

We are now an authorised reseller of domain names through TPP Wholesale, one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading domain registrars. You can now register and manage your .co.nz, .nz, .com.au, .au and .com domains directly through ServMe IT.

Pricing starts from $29.95 per year for .co.nz domains — competitive with the major providers, and backed by local support you can actually reach.

Register your domain at billing.servmeit.co.nz.

Looking for more domains, check out our other services at:

nzstore.servmedomains.co.nz

austore.servmedomains.co.nz

Web Hosting

Alongside domain registration, we now offer website hosting on our own New Zealand-based server infrastructure. Our hosting is built on ISPmanager, a professional-grade hosting control panel used by hosting providers worldwide.

Starter hosting plans begin at $9.95 per month, including email hosting and SSL certificates.

Set me up now!!

I want my own domain
Click register

A Single Place to Manage Everything

Our new client portal at billing.servmeit.co.nz lets you register domains, purchase hosting, view invoices and manage your services — all in one place. Payments are accepted via credit card (Stripe) or PayPal, and invoices include New Zealand or Australian GST.

Built on Open Source

Our billing platform runs on FOSSBilling, a free and open-source billing system.

As part of setting this up, we built a custom integration module connecting FOSSBilling to TPP Wholesale — and we’ve released it publicly for other NZ hosting businesses to use.

You can find it here on GitHub.

Check it out

our own FOSSBilling TPP Wholesale module
Click here for GitHub

Get Started

  • Ready to register a domain or set up hosting for your business?

Visit billing.servmeit.co.nz to get started, or contact us if you’d like to discuss your requirements.

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