If you’re running Mautic 5.2.4, using Twilio SMS integration in your campaigns, and suddenly find yourself with one contact getting 20+ identical SMS messages from the same campaign event over several days — you’re not alone. A recent thread in the Mautic community forum brought this frustrating issue to light, and it’s worth unpacking what might be going on.
The campaign in question was straightforward: a decision checking if an email was clicked, then waiting 2 days, sending a scheduled SMS during business hours, and continuing the flow. The kicker? No loops, no multiple paths back to the SMS send, and no duplicate SMS actions. But the SMS messages kept firing every time the mautic:campaigns:trigger cron job ran — roughly three times an hour. The floods only stopped when the sender manually flagged the contact as “Do Not Contact” for SMS.
What’s clear from digging into the database is that these are not ghost duplicates or Twilio nonsense. Each SMS record shows a successful send, all tied to the same campaign event in the Mautic system. However, the campaign event log only showed a single execution for the event. This suggests a disconnect between the logged event firing and the SMS being triggered multiple times.
There’s some suspicion around running mautic:campaigns:rebuild cron jobs repeatedly — in this case, scheduled three times per hour as well — as a potential culprit. It’s not a recommended production setup and could be contributing to state inconsistencies causing repeated SMS sends. Until now, no official bug report or fix has surfaced explicitly linking this behavior with Mautic 5.2.x, but the overlap with campaign rebuild frequency is a pattern to watch.
For now, if upgrading Mautic is off the table (we know it can be a bear if resources are tight), here are some practical steps:
- Reassess your cron schedule, especially reducing how often
mautic:campaigns:rebuildruns to avoid confusing the system. - Keep a close eye on the SMS contact opt-out statuses — once enabled, it reliably stops the repeated sends.
- Dive into other Mautic logs and database tables beyond just the event log. Look for irregularities in triggers or messaging stats that don’t line up perfectly.
The key takeaway? Scheduled SMS is a powerful but sometimes brittle feature that can throw unexpected repeats if your cron jobs aren’t dialed in tightly. It’s a reminder that running Mautic yourself means juggling these under-the-hood details — otherwise, you risk weird bugs like this.
If you want to see the full community discussion and join in for updates or workarounds, check out the original thread on the Mautic Community Forum.
And hey, if managing cron jobs and troubleshooting tricky bugs isn’t your cup of tea, Mailertizer offers a hosted Mautic platform that handles this technical mess for you — so you can focus on marketing, not maintenance.
