Today, I discovered that my SmarterMail is acting up again. When I attempted to check my emails, I get a really nice aspx error page.

My first thought is that someone has hacked my mail system, and is sending out spam again. I’ve had this problem before, and outlined the steps I undertook in order fix the problem in my post entitled, SmarterMail Security Lockdown Prodecures.

I shut down the SmarterMail Service and started looking at the mail logs, and event logs. I can see the out of memory errors, but I still don’t know what’s causing the problems.

I then restarted the SmarterMail Service and logged into my account to look at the reports being generated. There is nothing in the reports that are out of the ordinary.

My next thought was to see if I could check out what the overall network traffic looks like. I did a Google search on “network traffic monitor open source”, and I stumbled upon ntop. I installed the demo version, ntop v4.0.3. I wasn’t able to get ntop to work. After some additional research I discovered ntop-extra, but that has been discontinued. I uninstalled ntop and looked for something else.

I next installed, WireShark v1.4.3. After running the program for over an hour, I didn’t see suspicious network traffic. However, I did notice that the SmarterMail MailService.exe program was taking up to 45% CPU and ever increasing amounts of memory (now at 78MB).

At this point, I decided it was time to upgrade to the latest release of SmarterMail. I followed the upgrade instructions by first backing up the data files, then uninstalling the software, then running the installation program.

I am now running SmarterMail v7.4.3995. I will update this post if I continue to have problems. Otherwise, consider this issue resolved for now!

2011-01-14 – Update

The MailService.exe is still gobbling up lots of memory. I’ve verified that the mail system isn’t sending out spam emails, so I’m now looking into possible memory leak issues. I installed the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 debugging tools to see if I can spot any problems.