tracker issue : CF-3312296

I can provide logs from both CF 9 mail sent and our sending mail server. Please contact me with what details would be useful.

Comment by External U.

Have the same issue. 1 in a few thousand may sound non-critical. Unless it is a very important client that never gets the email you said they should. Please research this.

Vote by External U.

+1. This def needs looking at because it's been happening in CF for years. -- Adam

Vote by External U.

+1 having had to track down other issues in older versions of CF (4.5 and 5.0 back in the day) can say this can be maddening to try and find. Only question is does it occur in CF 10? The entire scheduler was replaced with Quartz for scheduled tasks and the forum post mentions the break point on CF 9 flipping between mailerTask and schedulerTask depending upon load.

Vote by External U.

This also occurs with CF10/Win2008 with all latest updates installed. Mail will work for several days, then stop sending per the bug report. A server reboot seems to clear the error & send all unsent/queued messages. This is in a dev environment, so low traffic and relatively few mails sent, but seems to reoccur every few days. Oddly, I've never had an issue with this using prior CF versions on WinNT/2000/2003.

Vote by External U.

I frequently get calls from clients indicating that they see a new order in the database, but didn't get any email notification. We often send email alerts to third-party providers, but we can't depend on CFMail (Spool or non-spool) since it doesn't consistently work. We've monitored our mailserver logs and there's no record of a connection yet ColdFusion logs it as "successful." (We've had to finally resort to using private RSS feeds in Outlook so that clients still feel like they are getting an actual email message.) This bug was reported ~4 months after ColdFusion 9 was initially released in 2010. It was recently pretty well researched & documented 3 months ago here ( http://forums.adobe.com/message/5280261#5280261 ) and the status still remains open/unverified. Please make this issue a priority.

Vote by External U.

I believe this should be fixed as well.

Vote by External U.

+1 for all the previous stated reasons. We rely on email being delivered as reported. I'd rather have mail fail and report it than to have the illusion of success.

Vote by External U.

I would be very happy to see this issue fixed in a patch of ColdFusion. Email messages just vanish with no real way to explain it to clients, and no ability to track or trace any part of issue - it's just an unexplained bug. I thought I was just going crazy, but it appears that this is a long-standing issue encountered by others.

Vote by External U.

Randomly undelivered emails causes hours of troubleshooting and no clear answer for us to provide to our clients.

Vote by External U.

Problems with a mail notification system having emails disappearing on a random basis, noted in CF logs it has sent, using Sendgrid to monitor but showing emails not left the building.

Vote by External U.

This is one that happens quite often in our system and it drives me bananas especially as we send an awful lot of emails out, it would be much better if Coldfusion had it's own SMTP server built in and we could have proper logging from the point of send to the point that the receiving server accepts it - that way if something goes wrong, we can find it!

Vote by External U.

I realize that the delivery of mail may not be entirely in the CF application server's control, but if there's anything on the CF end that is a problem or can be fixed (and it sounds like with people not having the problem until they run CF10), then it should. People look equate email with real physical letters. If it doesn't arrive after you say it has been sent, they distrust your entire business.

Vote by External U.

I can confirm I've seen this behavior. I don't know the exact percentage, but we see emails that CF reports as being successfully that the SMTP server was never aware of.

Comment by External U.

We get complains from users about important emails showing up. The ColdFusion logs indicate that the email was sent, but SMTP shows signs of never receiving the notification.

Vote by External U.

I agree 100% with a previous commenter,. People look equate email with real physical letters. If it doesn't arrive after you say it has been sent, they distrust your entire business. It is very important to get a bugs like this taken care of.

Vote by External U.

I have the same issue. Clients call and we spend time trying to track down why they didn't get an email that shows sent, that's how it impacts my productivity.

Vote by External U.

It is important that email delivery be reliable - silently dropping any email is a big problem. Increased logging that shows all steps in the process would be helpful.

Vote by External U.

Reliability of email delivery is critical in fostering trust. At least log the error if it fails.

Vote by External U.

+1 Reliable email delivery is critical. At the very least, an error should be logged when the connection fails.

Vote by External U.

In the digital age, email can be considered a legally binding form of communication. It is imperative that accurate logs are kept regarding whether or not an email was sent. Emails disappearing in to thin air without notification creates trust and legal issues with clients.

Vote by External U.

It is important that email delivery be reliable or at least log an error if it fails

Vote by External U.

In order to appear reliable to our customers, as well as insure that important communications are delivered, it's vital to be able to count on the integrity of our e-mail delivery.

Comment by External U.

Please note: There may be a correlation between the CF server doing a Garbage Collection and the missing email. This is very hard to track since all the ColdFusion logs show 100% of email went through but the receiving SMTP server logs that 99% actually got to the SMTP server.

Comment by External U.

We have many issues where we're trying to debug what happens with various emails that send out and it's very important to us to know when an email fails to send, for whatever reason. Right now, it's very hard to pick out what exactly is failing and where and takes up a lot of company time and resources.

Vote by External U.

It is important that email delivery be reliable or at least log an error if it fails

Vote by External U.

Reliable Email delivery is extremely important to our business. Many of our applications send emails on regular basis. It is very critical to us to know whether an email is sent successfully or not. Additional email logging will be very helpful to track down email issues.

Vote by External U.

Support emails to and from my customers go missing. Email process may send 8 emails and miss 6 even though there is no Error from CF and email server shows no record of transaction.

Vote by External U.

We depend on the email delivery to let us know about overnight failures. We need to start them as soon as we get in, not three hours later when our customer notices that the process did not run!

Vote by External U.

E-mail delivery is extremely important. If we can't reliably deliver all e-mails to our customers, we need some way to track the ones that do not get delivered with a log.

Vote by External U.

Proactive response to outages (a necessity in our business) is dependent on a reliable mail deliveryservice. Also, collecting data for outage/problem trend/MTBF/etc analysis and metrics is simpler with an assured email delivery service.

Comment by External U.

In this day and age, email is our main form of communication with our clients. It is imperative that accurate logs are kept regarding whether or not an email was sent. Therefore, email delivery is extremely important to our business. Many of our applications send emails on regular basis.

Vote by External U.

Adobe, PLEASE LOOK INTO THIS. Been going on for too long and we all need CFMail to be reliable *and* scalable.

Vote by External U.

We do have this happen on occasion. Please review.

Vote by External U.

we gave up on CFMail a long time ago because of this.

Comment by External U.

My clients rely heavily on emails from their application for notifications when system critical process occur. Email failures cost my clients time and money. Please help with this problem.

Vote by External U.

It is crucial to us and our client that our email is reliable. At minimum there should be an error alerting us that it has failed.

Vote by External U.

I just spent over 40 hours researching, proving, documenting, and providing workarounds to this bug. I even shared my testing and workaround coding. My entire multiple page synopsis can be found on page 2 of the following Adobe Community Forum: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/585718 (my post is under my handle of byron_knapp). ADOBE, please take note of all my work proving that this bug exists!

Comment by External U.

I just spent over 40 hours researching, proving, documenting, and providing workarounds to this bug. I even shared my testing and workaround coding. My entire multiple page synopsis can be found on page 2 of the following Adobe Community Forum: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/585718 (my post is under my handle of byron_knapp). ADOBE, please take note of all my work proving that this bug exists!

Vote by External U.

Nimit - Can you verify?

Comment by Vamseekrishna N.

Yes. These email spooling clog problems have been around forever, since the Allaire days. I remember setting up multiple standalone servers to do this so my site would not crash. Sometimes its a formation issue. Other times its a "blockage" in the pipe going out. I would send out 100K to 200K emails per day and all it takes is one bad email to make it stop or hang. Finally I resorted to creating an email project tracking process that would let me know the start, the end and how many email went in the sub-batches. I also had to use the error containers to keep this from blowing up. I even has a resend button. Seems like something that should be baked in automated into CF. CFmail deserves some TLC. The CFMail process saves a lot of $ versus hosted solutions - it's a shame it has not been enhanced with "canned email" templates that have been tested in mobile and other formats. This is also a missed opportunity and could be the start of a new love affair with CF as a real productivity tool - like in the early years.

Comment by External U.

I have tried to reproduce this bug on a Developer Edition with logging enabled for mail. I have sent around 10,000 emails and I was able to see that all the 10000 mails were received. Has anyone tried this on ColdFusion 10 or ColdFusion 11, if so are you still seeing this issue?

Comment by HariKrishna K.

Would be great if we can get a reproducible case for this or a confirmation that this is not an issue in CF10 or 11.

Comment by HariKrishna K.

I neglected to update this posting when we upgraded to CF10. Since the upgrade the mailsent log has not be falsely recording email as delivered successfully. What we found instead is the failed messages are recorded as not delivered in the mailsent log and are moved to the undelivered folder. So we setup a scheduled task to check the undelivered folder and try failed messages up to 4 times. We log these to a database to keep count of attempts and after the 4th attempt moving it back into the spool folder we delete it and store the message in a DB table. We haven't upgraded to CF11 yet, but will be 1st quarter 2015.

Comment by External U.

We would need to further discuss over call/connect meeting, i didn't get your contact information in our bugbase, please email me cfinstal@adobe.com for further discussion referring this bug. (Comment added from ex-user id:mquraish)

Comment by Adobe D.

(Hi to jasonk1technology and Quraishi. If you are going to discuss this privately, could you please also post anything meaningful back here for us spectators and past contributors ? Thanks in advance, byron_knapp)

Comment by External U.

Sure. If others can chip in too with reliable reproducible instructions, that would help in addressing the issue quickly.

Comment by Vamseekrishna N.

Hello Vamseekrishna Nanneboina, Is testing in CF-9-ent still of value? If so, I spent many hours on this bug last year, and posted a summary about it here (on this thread) My post on this thread was on Apr 30, 2013. In it, I refer to: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/585718 where I posted the very complete summary (because the 585718 thread seemed to be much more active than this thread). Thanks for any consideration you can provide, byron_knapp

Comment by External U.

Hi Byron_knapp, Actually for this bug, we would need to have more detailed discussion, which can be feasible through the call/connect meeting so i suggested jasonk1technology for same, sure i am also going through your complete summary and would update you for same. Meanwhile please email me at cfinstal@adobe.com referring this bug, i would contact you for your input as well. Yes, we would be definitely posting meaningful update here too. (Comment added from ex-user id:mquraish)

Comment by Adobe D.

To: jasonk1technology Hi , you wrote about the changes in CF10 as follows: ===== (start jasonk1technology quote): CF10... the mailsent log has not be falsely recording email as delivered successfully. What we found instead is the failed messages are recorded as not delivered in the mailsent log and are moved to the undelivered folder. So we setup a scheduled task to check the undelivered folder and try failed messages up to 4 times. We log these to a database to keep count of attempts and after the 4th attempt moving it back into the spool folder we delete it... (end jasonk1technology quote) ====== I would love to hear your take on these "failures" (those undelivered emails moved to the undelivered folder). Are they at a percentage failure rate that seem reasonable OR if you are of the impression that the failure rate is unacceptably high (and as such indicate a remaining bug, albeit prettied up in CF10 vs. CF9). It would seem to me that if "most or even many" of the mails are subsequentially delivered (especially on the first try in small batches) that perhaps there is still an "issue" with reliable mail delivery in CF10(?), and if it wasn't fixed in CF10, then "perhaps" it remains in CF11(?). On the other hand, "some" failures are obviously always to be expected and it is unclear if your "workaround" is addressing these "expected" failures, or is addressing something of a bigger scope. It has been 21 months since I spent time on this and I still rely on my own workarounds as already linked to in prior posts. Thus, any time you may take to elaborate on your previous post would be greatly appreciated :-) Thanks, byron_knapp

Comment by External U.

Hi All, Jason isn't getting this issue wrt CF9.0.1 as now they are using CF11 so they are further testing it with updated CF11 server and would have discussion with me again whereas i am also further discussing with Byron regarding it. (Comment added from ex-user id:mquraish)

Comment by Adobe D.

@Byron_knapp We won't be upgrading to CF11 until late 1st Quarter 2015, so I don't have any details on this version yet. With CF10 we are seeing the same number of emails not being delivered as CF9 but I'm ok with this, as they are correctly marked as not delivered and my work around is to re-send them up to 4 times. I'll update this again after we've been using CF11 for a few months.

Comment by External U.

Hi Bryon, I can see from your previous comment that you would be moving to ColdFusion 11 in the 1st Quarter of 2015. Did you move to ColdFusion 11 and if so, are you still facing this issue?

Comment by HariKrishna K.

Can anyone confirm, if they are still facing this issue on ColdFusion 11 or 10?

Comment by HariKrishna K.

We will wait for one more week before we close this issue. Please let us know if you have any feedback to share.

Comment by HariKrishna K.

Haven't heard back from anyone. Closing the bug. Please revert if you are able to reproduce it in CF 10 or CF 11.

Comment by HariKrishna K.

Hi Hari, Since you asked, this has been my experience so far with CF11. I have not encountered this problem after 10 months of using CF11-64-ent-win. I have my CF9 "work-around" (reported earlier) turned OFF for CF11 since I have not seen anything unusual in the "undelivered" folder and so far we have not had any reports from clients or staff about missing email.

Comment by External U.

Thanks Byron for the update. Good to hear that you don't see the undelivered problem anymore.

Comment by HariKrishna K.