Thursday, June 5, 2008

CF Mail Spooler Woes...

We have been having some issues with our mail server recently. Mail hasn't been going out and this is what we noticed in the logs:

"Error","scheduler-4","06/03/08","10:33:24",,"Could not connect to SMTP host: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, port: 25; nested exception is: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect"
javax.mail.MessagingException: Could not connect to SMTP host: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, port: 25;
nested exception is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect
and
"Error","scheduler-1","04/02/08","03:30:56",,"A problem occurred when attempting to deliver mail. This exception was caused by: coldfusion.mail.MailSpooler$SpoolLockTimeoutException: A timeout occurred while waiting for the lock on the mail spool directory.."
From what I found, this occurs for two reasons:
  1. Bombage from sending a huge email
  2. Insufficient disk space
Reference: http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=67FD4A34-50DA-0559-A042BCA588B4C15B

We did notice a message the other day claiming that we were running low on disk space.
There is a recent hotfix from Adobe that supposedly helps this that was released in April '08 that supersedes a previous hotfix in this area. That
hotfix can be found here: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402001&sliceId=1
We applied the hotfix today and cleared some disk space so we'll see happens.

Update: after getting our hands dirty today, KP found that there was a backup of 10,000+ emails in the inetpub/mailroot/queue directory. Something is getting hosed at that level. He found this by telnet'ing to the server's port 25 and sending a message. It told him that the message had been queued for delivery. He never did get the message which told us that the bottleneck was at the queue. We've got a ticket opened up to check it out.

2 comments:

Nick said...

Hey, I just noticed this problem happening to me too. I use GoDaddy.com for my coldfusion/hosting server. Guess I need to get them on it huh? There is probably nothing I can do about it right?

Teeps (Terry Palmer) said...

It all depends on who is hosting our smtp service. If they control the server that your cfmail settings are pointed to, then yeah, check with them. You might do a quick test with an alternate smtp server and see what happens. If it works using a different server, then the problems are likely with that specific mail server. If you have issues with both servers, then the problem will be with your coldfusion server or app.