Mail.MailSpooler SpoolLockTimeoutException

Question

An exception occurred while configuring the mail server settings. This Exception was thrown: coldfusion.mail.MailSpooler $ SpoolLockTimeoutException: A timeout occurred while waiting for a lock in the mail spool directory.

I recently started getting this nasty exception in the mail.log file. As soon as this exception occurs, every mail sent from this coldfusion instance raises the same exception.
The only thing that works is to restart the coldfusion server. After a (usually) day or two, the same exception appears again, and we are back in the same situation.

I am aware of a fix for managing mailspool timeout , but all it does is increase the timeout from 30 to 60 seconds. Since emails are sent successfully until I get an exception, I don't think this is my solution.

I also read the thread on the adobe forum where people installed the patch but still get the error.

I also tried the script to restart the mailservice service when this exception occurred, but this did not work for me, as it is not for others with this problem. This would also not be a concrete solution.

• The letters I send arre simple html mails.
• The number of emails sent during the day is not more than 30.
• I sent emails from the same cold cooling server many times before, but with <cfmail> . This is the first time I submit them to cfscript. I do not know if this has anything to do with it, but only since then I have been using the cfscript <cfmail> equivalent, which I started to get this exception.

All related blog posts that I could find were left unanswered, but also pretty old. I thought someone might have a solution.

Thanks.

(using coldfusion 9.0.1 server on a Windows 2008 server)

Answer 1

We also encountered a mail blocking problem. After the problem arose for the fourth time in 2 months, we began to review these forums and did not find a solution.

This made me think that maybe the solution and the problem are actually not CF at all, so I went into server protection and excluded the SM email directory so that the anti-virus protection did not touch the spool directory at all. So far, we have not had a problem again.

So I'm not sure if this is a permanent fix, but it still worked for us. No external entities create emails in our systems, so the directory should be relatively secure, but not working with email is not an option.

Answer 2

this talktree chain may give some light:

http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=67FD4A34-50DA-0559-A042BCA588B4C15B

what they say is that it can be a problem when disk activity takes a long time. you can increase the mail queue timeout with the jvm argument: -Dcoldfusion.spooltimeout = 120

oh .... one more thing. if you use cfmail to send email dumps when an error occurs, be sure to add the text 'format = "to the cfdump tags. Some of the emails may be quite large and may cause an error.