Hopefully the things you are trying will solve your problems.  If not,
as a workaround and also as a diagnostic aid, use a program like Servers
Alive(or whatever) to count files in the SMTP directory and when you hit
a specified number of files in the queue directory, have it auto-restart
the Imail SMTP service AND your MS DNS server service(if local).

Dave



  

   

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2004 3:22 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] SMTP32.exe dies and stops spawning

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. 

The Imail servers are running Windows 2000. The SMTP services do have 
debugging mode enabled. I forgot about the Dr Watson logs; I've 
checked them, and found that there are indeed crashes from the times 
SMTP32 stops spawning (c0000005 access violation errors), but these 
errors show up quite often (many times per day) in the Dr Watson 
logs, and only occasionally does the SMTP32 process stop spawning 
after this error. Those errors are probably not a good sign in and of 
themselves, but from what I've read, there are a number of possible 
causes. We are a web hosting company, so these servers each host 
hundreds of domains (the one I've been looking at closely hosts about 
700 domains, the other one I was working on yesterday has about 1500 
domains), so a lot of stuff might be wrong with client's aliases, 
corrupted messages, etc. that could be causing these errors. It's 
hard to tell exactly without manually reading through the 75-150MB 
daily log files looking for issues. Had to fix a broken alias on one 
account just yesterday that was causing quite a few errors in the 
logs, but only noticed it because of the sheer volume of emails the 
client's domain was receiving. 

In the meantime, I've tried the following config changes on the one 
server:

 - Upped the max recipients per message from 50 to 100. I gather this 
is one potential cause of the access violation errors (due to nested 
aliases, etc.), so perhaps this will help.

 - Removed the extra DNS server IPs from the Domain Name Server 
Address box, so there's just one in there now.

 - The server (like all of our Imail servers) is already configured 
to relay all outgoing messages through a gateway server, but the 
gateway server name was entered as a hostname. I've changed this to 
the gateway server's IP. We'll see if this eliminates the need for 
DNS lookups and maybe makes this issue go away. 

I'll keep an eye on this server for a week or two to see what 
happens. If it's still going on, I will see about opening an issue 
with Imail, though I'm not sure if we have a service agreement with 
them or not (and our 7.15 installs are a couple of years old, for the 
most part, so they're long past warranty). The issue does not seem to 
happen daily on every server (thank goodness...), but the number of 
Imail servers we have mean I usually have to deal with one or two of 
these issues every day, and I'm not the only one working on these 
servers by any means...

Denny Kennedy

> I've just looked through a 100 MB log file for IMail 8.05, and I can't
find 
> a single occurrence of ":53]".  And I certainly don't ever remember 
> observing the _SMTP_ processes logging info about the _DNS_ protocol
actions.
> 
> Is your IMail box in debug logging mode?
> 

> 1) Setup a windows machine with the MS SMTP SVC and use it as an
outbound 
> relay where ...
> 
> 2) your Imail servers' SMTP "send all mail through gateway" field
contains 
> the IP of the gateway machine.
> 
> Imail SMTP will not have to do any DNS lookups because it's dropping
all 
> outbound on a single IP.
> 
> If using the outbound gateway stops your Imail boxes from dying, you
will 
> have freed yourself from the nightmare and restored good service to
your 
> users.  And that "fix" would be an useful result in analyzing why
Imail was 
> stopping.
> 
> Len
> 
> 
> _____________________________________________________________________
> http://IMGate.MEIway.com : free anti-spam gateway, runs on 1000's of
sites
> 
> 
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