1

I am currently working on a newsletter application which needs to sent around 20K mails in a single shot. I feel, ColdFusion mail sending capacity will not be suitable for this. I don’t have any metrics with me to prove this.

I searched around in web about this, I found there are lot of complains about this kind of bulk mail sending process using built in CFMAIL. Few of them are,

  • Java heap size error

  • IOException while sending message

  • Mail Spool Lock

  • Mail Spool Timeout

We are using Adobe ColdFusion 9 standard edition.

Is anyone worked like this requirement? Did you faced any issues? How did you fixed that? Is any other alternative ways are there instead of using regular cfmail tag?

JS Mitrah
  • 686
  • 5
  • 12
  • 2
    I would be inclined to look at an alternative option - while mailshots of this size are viable it will result in quite a queue. – Simon at The Access Group Apr 17 '12 at 14:43
  • What MTA are you using? Windows-based or something Linux-based like postfix or sendmail? With a Linux-based MTA mail can be sent out as fast as CF can generate it, so even if you spool to disk (which I recommend) you won't have an issue with too many files in the /Spool folder. – David Faber Apr 17 '12 at 18:35

4 Answers4

4

We have a system sending out nearly 500k messages about 2 to 3 times per day. CF does not have a problem with it if you have adequate resources allocated - meaning decent drives and space, adequate heap space, and (especially) a well performing SMTP relay. In our case we set up a dedicated relay server that we could fine tune carefully.

CF Mail has not had significant issues since ColdFusion 7. CF 8 and CF 9 both perform well. There is a level at which I would suggest a different system to be sure - and other requirements might mean an SaaS would serve you better - but from a per performance standpoint 20k messages is fairly small and should not be a problem for an enterprise class server.

Mark A Kruger
  • 7,183
  • 20
  • 21
1

I think you may face issue if you are using Standard version, I am not sure but there is some thread limit (I guess it it is 10) for spool for standard version which will delay email. Let's say there are 10 threads for spool and every thread wait for 15 seconds for next run (can be adjust from CFIDE) still it will take around 8.333 hours to send out all emails.

Pritesh Patel
  • 1,969
  • 1
  • 18
  • 32
0

We have been using ColdFusion as a webmail delivery system since version 6. We have mail groups with 20k recipients.

We experienced one issue with it back then, the spooler hung and started retransmitting the same mail over and over again, making recipients receive the mail multiple times.

I think this issue was resolved with version 7.

jontro
  • 10,241
  • 6
  • 46
  • 71
0

If I recall well there's a difference between coldfusion standard and enterprise. Enterprise versions has enhanced CFMAIL throughput. At least it used to be in previous versions.

Marburg
  • 1