mail.MailSpooler SpoolLockTimeoutException

Question

An exception occurred when setting up mail server parameters. This exception was caused by: coldfusion.mail.MailSpooler$SpoolLockTimeoutException: A timeout occurred while waiting for the lock on the mail spool directory..

Recently i started to get this nasty exception in my mail.log file. Once this exception shows up, every mail that is sent from that coldfusion instance throws the same exception.
The only thing that seems to work is to restart the coldfusion server. After (usually) a day or two the same exception pops up again and we're back in the same situation.

I am aware of the hotfix to control the mailspool timeout but all it does is increase the timeout from 30 to 60 seconds. Since the mails are sent successfully until i get the exception, i don't think this is my solution.

Also i read the thread in the adobe forum where people have installed the hotfix, but still get the error.

I also tried a script to restart only the mailservice when this exception showed up, but this didn't work for me, as it didn't for others with this problem. This would also not be a concrete solution.

• The mails that i send arre simple html mails.
• The number of mails sent spreaded over a day is not more then 30.
• I've sent mails from the exact same coldfusion server many times before, but with <cfmail>. This is the first time i'm sending them in cfscript. I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it's only since i'm using the cfscript equivalent of <cfmail> that i started to get this exception.

All related blog posts that i could find are all unanswered but also pretty old. I thought that someone might have a solution by now.

Thanks.

(using coldfusion 9.0.1 server on windows 2008 server)

Answer 1

We were also experiencing this mail spool lock issue. After the issue occurred a fourth time in 2 months, we started reviewing these forums and found no solution.

This made me think that perhaps the solution and problem are not really CF at all, so I went into the server's virus protection and excluded the CF mail spool directory so that the virus protection does not touch the spool directory at all. So far, we have not had the problem again.

So I am not sure that this is the permanent fix, but it has worked so far for us. No outside entities create emails within our systems, so the directory should be relatively safe but not having email-outs work is not an option.

Answer 2

this chain from talkingtree might give some light:

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

what they are saying is that it could be an issue with disk activity taking to long. you can increase the mail spool timeout with the jvm argument: -Dcoldfusion.spooltimeout=120

oh.... one more thing. if you're using cfmail to email dumps when an error occurrs, make sure to add 'format="text"' to the cfdump tags. some of the emails can get pretty big and might be causing the error.