Exception occurred when setting up mail server parameters

 

 

 

 

 

From time to time we’ve has this ColdFusion error occur over a period of years regarding the setup of mail server parameters:

Message: An exception occurred when setting up mail server parameters. Detail : This exception was caused by: javax.mail.MessagingException:
Connect failed; nested exception is: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out.

Once in this state, ColdFusion would no longer send emails anymore and the only solution was to restart CF. There are a number of discussions in the blogosphere and StackOverflow which we did look into and implemented various scripts to re-queue the emails, but it was annoying that we couldn’t determine the cause.

Recently it started up again, and what’s odd is we have 7 identical web servers behind a load balancer (VMs that were all coped off the same image), and only one of them was experiencing the issue (Windows 2003 Server, CF8 32bit).

Well we finally figured it out – it was McAfee anti-virus. Once we added an exception to not monitor the ColdFusion directory, the problems went away.

Hope that helps if anyone encounters this.

Written by Tariq Ahmed