Email script stopped working

[andywilliams99]

As of yesterday all email scripts related to my site stopped working. The only way I can get mails to send is to restart the SMTP service of the server (OScent Linux with Plesk).

I note that the service keeps stopping for no apparent reason and i have to manually restart it to get mails sending again.

The sorts of mails that go through the server are customer contacts and order confirmations via a web store and cron job confirmation mails.

Some of these are arriving after restarting the service but with a huge delay.

A couple of questions then:

- how can i find out what it stopping the service (there have been no changes)
- how can i find out if there is anything untoward happeing (i.e my mail server being used as a relay?)

[sublime1]

Hi --

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

(This is probably not the right forum to be asking these questions -- this is for Apache web server stuff.)

Here's one idea...

If the SMTP daemon is dying, it's possible that it is being killed as your server runs out of memory. Or it's possible that it is crashing. You should be able to see either of these in your server logs (and if you don't have access, your web host should).

There are many online services that can check your mail server for correct configuration -- try pingability for example.

Tom