Saturday, 27th October 2007MDaemon Server Errors from Spam Filter (CFEngine, CFilter & AntiVirus)
Spam Filter did not respond within expected time limit; CFEngine may have stopped responding; it will be stopped and restarted
I purchased a copy of ALT-Ns excellent "MDaemon" around a year ago, having had good experiences with it in the past. The installation went well and the Spam Filter did the best job I've ever seen of reducing spam to my clients Inboxes. Unfortunately, over the last 6 months MDaemon has starting getting flaky - I've had all sorts of incidents such as ALL the alias information vanishing from the server (and paying $100 for a 5 minute phone call to be told where a backup copy is stored) to a regular errors in my servers event log such as this:
Event Type: Warning
Event Source: MDaemon
Event Category: None
Event ID: 527
Date: 25/09/2007
Time: 13:01:46
User: N/A
Computer: PEP
Description:
*** ALERT **** Spam Filter did not respond within expected time limit; CFEngine may have stopped responding; it will be stopped and restarted [EvProcess]
Has anyone else out there had this problem? If so, please just add a comment below!
Unfortunately, these errors have now escalated to regular service outages. MDaemon simply stops working, display either a runtime error message or an Application Error dialog box. There seems to be no pattern to these occurrences - sometimes I can go a week without seeing one, sometimes I get them several times in one day. All I can do is try and check my server every few hours (even on the weekend) which is obviously less than ideal and certainley not what I paid for)
I've contacted MDaemon about this numerous times (the only free support you get even in the first year of owning the server is via their forum), you can see the latest attempt here:
http://lists.altn.com/WebX/.eed8180?50@735.3wTZaXlVMYv@
Addendum
It seems that version 9.6.2 of MDaemon has a bug affecting systems using the ODBC setup to store account information in Microsoft SQL Server - this causes a runtime error at midnight in some cases. Changing this has indeed prevented runtime errors on my system, but the Spam Filter errors persist.