Beware of ServerObjects.com - AspMail
Full of anger, I sit down and write this post.
I do it because I want to warn you all and tell you the story I've been through
with ServerObjects and Aspmail's smtpsvg.dll
I am the sysadmin an co-owner of a small hosting company which serves nearly 1000 sites
on both Linux and Windows servers.
When we started hosting Win2k based sites in 2001 we looked into modules for sending
mail through asp scripts and choosed Jmail and ASPmail. The later was more popular and widely
used while the first was nice and free. We didn't want to use only one module and we were happy
with our decission, the module worked OK at the time.
In the last year, we had 3 incident regarding aspmail. Processes didn't complete correctly, IIS crashed
because of it and a lot of time was put trying to solve this. On all events we tried to contact ServerObjects
but none of our email got responded, ever!
Last Thurday one of our servers started to hang every few hours and using IISstatus.dll we saw that all
pages that got stuck in the inetinfo process were using aspmail to send mail.
While this situation happens, asp and html processes are running fine, but all asp pages that try to use
the DLL keep waiting in the process without any success. If the user hits the stop button on the browser,
the thread will hang in the inetinfo process until IIS is restarted. Also, we noticed that while this
situation happens, Jmail can send email correctly, so it is not a problem with the smtp host.
Once IIS is restarted, aspmail starts to work correctly again.
I already sent 3 emails to serverobjects.com and the last one bounced, saying mailbox does not exist.
Maybe the whole company does not exist anymore? From the look of their website, it wasn't changed for more
than 2 years, same look from 2 years ago...
While googling for an answer I coulnt's find anyone with such a problem and posts to Microsoft's IIS forums
came out with approaches of how to change the sites to work with different modules or write a clone like VB
script that will take the input from asp pages that use aspmail and pass it to Jmail, which is what we're going
to do now until we can migrate all sites to work with Jmail. Also, other admins approved that only the developer
can help me out solving this situation.
So, this is the story. If any of you fellows are using aspmail, be sure you have someone who can reverse engineer
dll's in case of a problem, cause you won't hear back from ServerObjects.com
Thanks for reading and keep an eye on software vendors that your business depends on!
Cheers,
Justin
