Mail services timeout

[cedric]

Hi,

I have a problem with the mail services, sometimes the services (IMAP, POP3, SMTP) are down for a while, could be 5 minutes or 1 hour and in the worst case I have to shutdown and restart the Ability mail server application. (I see this with my supervision server)
I am seeing in the Ability log a blank during this period, I did not find interesting information in the Windows event at the moment.

Mainly, problems happens around midnight and concern IMAP more than POP3 and SMTP. But that could happened at every moment in the day even if it is often around midnight.

I am wondering if this is related to a scheduled task or another action on the Windows Server that could impact the Ability mail. Around midnight I can understand it because we made some backup. But I do not understand why only the mailing service is impacted and why we need to restart it sometimes. In addition, we did not find any impact for other applications like DHCP, DNS, etc used on the same server.

Do you have any idea about that ? Maybe we have to configure something on the Ability Mail Server or Windows ?

System :
- Windows server 2012 R2 version 6.3.9600
- Hardware : Lenovo x3550 M5
- Ability mail : Version 4.2.1 Professional edition


Thank you for your help,

Cédric.

[Code Crafters]

What is the scheduled task you're running? I guess it's a backup of your Ability Mail Server files? As long as it's only copying files then that shouldn't cause any issues. You could always set up a scheduled task to start the amslauncher.exe after the backup completes but again this shouldn't be necessary.

Abiltiy Mail Server has an amsloader.exe application that watches amsmain.exe main application and restarts it in the event of a crash. However, if the application is there but unresponsive, sometimes amsmain.exe may not get restarted.

Normally Ability Mail Server runs very stable. Ours often runs for months at a time and usually is only restarted on server reboot or for updates.

Are you running a lot of POP3 retrievals on a short Poll Frequency? POP3 retrievals are the only part of the system that have been reported to have caused any unresponsive behaviour. Crashes have been occasionally reported from the OpenSSL DLLs but you'd see that in the Windows event viewer.

[cedric]

Hi,

The scheduled tasks are for applications and MySQL database backup.
I was just wondering if the backup could affect the performance of the Ability application or something like that (memory, disk, cpu ...) ?

Honestly, I am not sure if the Ability "crashed" totaly, I think it is maybe different because I can open or change something on the Ability application when the problem occurred (I didn't try at midnight), however I am sure the protocols are down : POP3, IMAP, SMTP. During this time we cannot properly use the email service and if I shutdown then restart the Ability application, everything is ok again, it is for that I think this is something related.

POP3 retrieval is not enabled in our case. I didn't see anything about OpenSSL DLL, but I am not really familiar with the Event viewer, I am still on it.

Attached, sample of email I received about the problem, this one is today, in this case the problem was solved itself 11 minutes later.

Thank you,

Cédric

[Code Crafters]

It is certainly possible that a large backup could hog the server's resources and cause Ability Mail Server to become unresponsive in that time.

The important thing is that once the backup is over, Ability Mail Server should resume as normal. You shouldn't have to restart Ability Mail Server ever. It's possible that the monitoring software itself could be causing Ability Mail Server to not recover by trying to access it when it is unresponsive due to low system resources. You could try disabling the monitoring at the time of the backups to test if this fixes the need to restart Ability Mail Server. Needing a restart is certainly not normally needed and is the main concern here.

We run SQL server and other backups at night too and our Ability Mail Server runs for months until the system is rebooted for Windows updates or an Ability Mail Server update is applied.

If you can't get round the issue, you may have to schedule a task to restart Ability Mail Server. If you kill the amsmain.exe process, there is a monitoring app called amsloader.exe that will restart amsmain.exe automatically if it is shutdown abnormally. If this doesn't work, try killing amsloader.exe then amsmain.exe and then, after a small pause to give them time to shut down, starting amslauncher.exe which will start the other 2 back up again.

[cedric]

Hi,

Thank you for your answer,

I will try to monitor that but it looks complicated. My monitoring server only uses "ping" and "SNMP", WMI is not enabled.

Today we had the problem, only for IMAP, during 1 hour : ~02:45pm to ~03:45pm. No scheduled tasks were running and the activity was quiet...
The problem was solved automatically, but no IMAP service for 1 hour is quite long in my opinion.

Before, I can see some WAS and service control manager errors, but I don't know if it is relevant at the moment, anyway this kind of problem occured at different times without email problems. Some other errors/warnings about DNS for example but that looks OK.

- Event 5186 WAS : A worker process with process id of '63552' serving application pool 'WebApiService' was shutdown due to inactivity. Application Pool timeout configuration was set to 20 minutes. A new worker process will be started when needed.
=> Seems OK : https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/lib ... 34(v=ws.10).aspx

- Event 7036 Service Control Manager : The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the stopped state.
=| Seems OK : https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... 81(v=ws.10).aspx

No idea if it is something with the server, the Ability application, something else... I try to find something with my little windows experience
Do you think it might be interesting to update the Ability application in the latest version ?

Thank you,

Cédric

[Code Crafters]

These events are not Ability Mail Server.

Do you have any antivirus software running that could be doing background email protocol scanning as this definitely can cause massive issues with email protocols?

We should be releasing a new version 4.2.3 later today. You can follow us via http://www.codecrafters.com/SocialMediaAndMailingLists to be informed when new updates are released. I wouldn't expect anything in this update to affect your issue though.

[cedric]

Hi,

I may have identified something strange, this morning we had the problem again. I had a look at the services and AMS was stopped (see attachment "AMS service.png").
I tried to start the service but that was impossible and I had these errors in the event viewer :

- Event 7009 Service Control Manager : A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Ability Mail Server 4 service to connect.
- Event 7000 Service Control Manager : The Ability Mail Server 4 service failed to start due to the following error: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

Then, I stopped and restarted the Ability application (I killed the "Ability Mail Service" and "amsloader" processes) and the email was OK, I tried to send emails and that was OK.
However, the AMS service seen in the attachment still does not run and I had the same error, still stopped.
I do not understand why, but I am wondering if something like a previous installation or a corrupt service could impact the Ability. Or perhaps this is common ?

Do you have any idea about that ?

Thank you,

Cédric

[Code Crafters]

We recommend the following to manually re-install the service:

1) Open Ability Mail Server (Run as administrator) and untick the Run as NT Service in the general settings and save settings to try and prompt an NT service uninstall.
2) Make sure no Ability Mail Server processes are running - stop amslauncher.exe, amsloader.exe, amsmain.exe in that order. Check with task manager (ctrl+alt+delete or right click task bar at bottom of screen).
3) Open the run prompt (Windows Key+R or via start menu) and type “regedit” (no quotes) then enter to start the registry editor.
4) Go to the path “Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CODE_CRAFTERS_AMS4_SERVICE” and delete this folder.
5) Reboot computer (don’t start Ability Mail Server yet).
6) Repeat steps 3 and 4 to check that the service folder is still deleted (leave regedit open). If the NT service wasn’t removed correctly, start again from step 1 and hopefully it will be second time around based on the order things were removed.
7) Now load Ability Mail Server (Run as administrator). In the general settings tick the option to “Run as NT Service” and save settings to reinstall the service in the correct location.
8) Check that the service has been properly created in the regedit path from step 4 and/or “Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services”.

[cedric]

Hi,

I will schedule the operation next week and I will let you know the result.

Thank you and have a good week end !

Cédric

[cedric]

Hi,

I did it, then I rebooted but the problem is still the same.
I also tried to install the latest version of AMS but this is the same.

In addition, the service is still considered stopped in services.msc.

Do you have another idea ?

Thank you,

Cédric

[Code Crafters]

If you want to email us at info@codecrafters.com with remote desktop / team viewer credentials, we can go on your server and try to fix the service problem if you like?

[cedric]

Hi,

20 minutes ago we had a problem on the Ability Mail server, it was stuck and unresponsive, the email service was not working at all and the Ability interface displayed something as 17 POP3 and 27 IMAP4 connections, this is quite a lot for us (unusual).

We had to close the Ability application with the Task Manager, but that took about 5 or 10 minutes, that was really long to close the application. Then the application was restarted and everything is OK now.

If you are available, I am interested by the teamviewer session. Precision : we cannot reboot the server before, at least, 6pm.
Is it possible for you this afternoon after 3pm or tomorrow morning, or later ?

Thanks

[Code Crafters]

We will schedule the remote desktop session via email.