If you’re running Mautic 5.2.4 and noticed your scheduled campaign SMS messages firing off repeatedly for the same contact—even when your campaign design looks clean—you’re not alone. A recent discussion on the Mautic community forum highlights a puzzling scenario: a simple campaign with no loops or duplicate SMS actions ended up spamming one contact with over 20 identical SMS messages. Ouch.
The campaign in question had a pretty standard setup: check if an email was clicked, wait two days, then send a scheduled SMS (only during business hours and weekdays). But instead of sending one SMS as intended, the system sent many more, seemingly every time the mautic:campaigns:trigger command ran.
What’s suspicious? The SMS records in the database show all messages tied back to the same campaign event ID, but the campaign event log itself only shows that event triggered once. So it’s not the campaign re-entering the contact or looping the SMS action, but Mautic is nonetheless creating multiple records—and sending every one through Twilio.
Twilio confirmed it was real SMS traffic, not just database duplicates. And toggling the Do Not Contact (SMS) flag for the contact immediately stopped the flood of messages—so Mautic was definitely behind it.
There’s chatter the way cron jobs are scheduled—particularly running mautic:campaigns:rebuild every 20 minutes—might be linked. This frequent rebuilding is generally discouraged in production precisely because it can mess with campaign state and contact progress. It’s worth reviewing your cron schedules to avoid this.
Unfortunately, there’s no official fix or confirmed bug in the 5.2.x line that neatly explains this behavior yet. Also, upgrading isn’t always an option right away for many users (hello, resource constraints). In the meantime, here are some practical tips:
- Check your cron schedule—especially frequent
campaigns:rebuildruns—and adjust to recommended intervals (daily or less frequent). - Use the Do Not Contact (SMS) flag as a quick throttle for anyone getting spammed.
- Dive into the
mautic_sms_message_statsandmautic_campaign_lead_event_logtables to track precisely which events are triggering SMS sends. - Monitor your campaign designs for subtle loops or contact re-entry points, even if you think there aren’t any.
At Mailertizer, we see this kind of behavior crop up from time to time and it’s a reminder that automations aren’t just about building flows—they’re about understanding when and how your platform runs behind the scenes. If you’re juggling cron complexity or resource limits, a hosted Mautic solution like Mailertizer can take that weight off your shoulders, handling proper configs and scale for you.
Want to dig deeper? Check out the original forum thread with ongoing insights and community suggestions: https://forum.mautic.org/t/mautic-5-2-4-scheduled-campaign-sms-repeatedly-sent-from-the-same-campaign-event/
