Email Keeps Appearing in Mail Spool Several Times Per Minute

Question

I am wondering if anyone has any ideas about this: I am trying to solve some sort of mail issue with ColdFusion 2016:
The same message keeps appearing in the mail spool several times per minute.
Nothing seems to be actively sending it out - it doesn't seem to be a scheduled task or a human doing it. I have no idea what could be causing this. If it matters, the mail is being sent via a Google Workspace account and does make it to its destination - repeatedly.

I have tried restarting the server but the problem still lives on. I'd emphasize that it seems to be one particular email that was originally generated by ColdFusion...and if I go back to the source and change the code for the email/text of the email, it doesn't actually change the email that keeps appearing in the mail/spool directory.

ebcohen · Accepted Answer

Please address my first and second points, about what the mailsent and mail logs show.

And if you may feel they show "nothing", the please know this is not something you just need to suffer with. There will be an explanation. And I'm confident we could resolve this in a quick online consulting session (more at carehart.org/consulting). I realize you may not want to have to pay for a solution. I'm just trying to help, as I do with people daily. There are few problems I can't solve--and you won't pay for time you don't value.

I have several diagnostic approaches and no-cost tools in mind that could be brought to bear on this, but they are too numerous to list. And each would produce a result that would point to the next, with too many permutations to write them all out here now.

But again, let's start with simply what's in the logs.

Thanks again Charlie. I think I have the answer and it wasn't anything to do with Coldfusion. Between backup options, they had setup Google Drive's backup tool and included the ColdFusion directory. For some reason I can't explain, it was replacing this one particular mail file every time it was sent and removed. I turned off/removed Google Drive, and that seems to have fixed it. Pretty sure. There is nothing unusual in the mail logs and nothing at all in the Undelivr folder. Again, pretty sure I have solved it. Thanks so much for your amazing helpfulness.

Charlie Arehart · Answer

There will be an explanation and resolution. There's no feature in cf that should be causing this.

First, we should prove if it's indeed not cf somehow causing this. Do you find a mailsent.log in cf's logs folder? If not, it can be enabled via a checkbox on the cf admin mail page. If you have the log, do you see it indicating the repeated creation of this email? Assuming you don't let's move on.

Second, look at the mail.log. Do you see an entry for each time the mail is attempted but FAILED to be sent FROM the spool to the destination smtp server? If there's an error each time, have you sought to solve that?

Third, such a failure would cause cf to put the email in cf's undelivr folder (sibling to spool). Are you finding it being put there? Are they piling up there?

If not, fourth, you could have in place a tool (like a cf scheduled task) which WATCHES that undelivr folder and moves any email there to the spool, under the assumption that whatever caused it to fail originally was temporary. That could certainly explain the message appearing to you as being in the spool repeatedly.

Finally, if you remove (move) all email out of undelivr, does the madness stop? If so, it confirms that SOMETHING was moving the email out of that to the spool.

Let us know what you find, or perhaps someone else will have a different take on things.

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