AMS Locking Up

[Code Crafters]

We used Norton Antivirus for a while and would definitely recommend that if you have it but AVG Free edition is what we use now and have no problems with this at all so I'd recommend giving that a go since there is no charge in trying it out.

[cearnshaw]

Chris, I think we have finally found what triggers the lock-up. We find when a user tries to open a large attachment from within web-mail it locks-up the server. We had one customer with a 2.1 MB pdf file and we could make it AMS lock-up every time we tried to view the attachment. The server would display the "Ability Mail Server has encountered a problem and needs to shut down" message on its screen and the web mail service will lock up. Usually the other services remain operating until we click on the "shut down" button, although we have found that sometimes all services stop.

The machine is running Win XP Pro, SP2, and is equipped with Intel Celeron CPU running at 3.46 GHz and 2 GB of RAM.

Hopefully this will give you a clue to what's happening and a allow you to come up with a possible work around.

We are not running the enhanced web mail pages. Should we be?

Thanks!

Cam

[Code Crafters]

That's good news and we'll investigate this and try to fix it for the next update.

The new WebMail enhanced templates are quite a few years old now so you should use these if you can. If you don't have any domain specific templates or any real custom WebMail settings, you can simply delete your WebMail.ini file to reset the WebMail settings to defaults which include using enchanced WebMail template mode which has many new features.

Thanks for the feedback. Let me know if you can still trigger this behaviour with the enhanced template mode.

[cearnshaw]

Hi Chris,

We repeated the test from another computer and were not able to get AMS to lock-up like we could at the first. We think it must be some combination of factors, but definitely from the first computer we could make it lock up whenever we were in web mail and tried to open this one attachment.

The good news is that we haven't had a single lock-up since we switched to the enhanced template. It's only been four days, so perhaps too soon to declare victory, but I'm hopeful. We're not able to repeat the test whereby we locked the server up at will, because this was a customer's house and with a particular .pdf file that the customer has since deleted.

I'll give you a status update in another week or two.

Definitely the enhanced web mail is a nice update, and I would recommend it to anyone regardless.

Cam

[Code Crafters]

Let's hope that this was just an old bug with the old templates then. With the next major version we'll be replacing the current WebMail with a brand new APS.Net MVC web interface that should hopefully be a massive improvement again on the current WebMail. Let me know if the new templates seem to have solved the problem in a few weeks.

[cearnshaw]

FYI, it's now been twelve days since our switch to the enhanced web mail templates and we've not a single issue since.

Cam

[Code Crafters]

Glad to hear it

[cearnshaw]

It's going on three months now with no further incidents of web mail locking up, so I think it's safe to say that upgrading web mail was the solution.

Thanks for your previous assistance with this.

Cam

[Code Crafters]

I'm glad that upgrading to the latest version fixed it for you. Thanks for keeping us posted.