CFMAIL processing one at time really slow

I'm running CF 4.5 SP2 on a Dual Processor XEON 2.4ghz, Windows 2000 Server.

I'm using CFMAIL to send out about 2000 emails at a time and the ColdFusion Server is only processing the emails in the SPOOL folder one at a time.

I have the SPOOL interval set to 15, so I'm getting a whopping 4 emails per minute. These emails are not failing, they're just leaving really slow.

Am I missing any hidden settings that could be causing this?

While I think that the rate of email handling seems very slow even for CF 4.5, it is possible that it's just that slow. CF5 and CFMX provide massive improvements in the mail engine, and CFMX 6.1 can send over 1 million emails per hour, so it may just be a limitation of the fact that you're using a version of CF that is 4+ years old. I'd strongly recommend upgrading, the basic version of CFMX 6.1 is only about $800 which is nothing compared to the total cost of hardware and the total cost of building a complex web application.

It also depends on what edition of CFMX 6.1 you're using. While CFMAIL has been improved remarkably from 4.5, some of the advanced CFMAIL features are only available in Enterprise Edition. Read more about the new CFMAIL features here:

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx...es/mail_61.html
http://www.macromedia.com/software/...eatures/cfmail/

Specifically, the "1,000,000 e-mails per hour" stat applies only to CFMX 6.1 Enterprise because apparently it uses a multi-threaded mail delivery handler so it can deliver more than one e-mail concurrently.

I'm not sure why, but I think I found the problem. It may be how CF4.5 processes on a XEON MP Server. Just for kicks, I loaded up a few test servers to calculate throughput. CF4.5 Email worked fine on a P3 866, P4 1.7, P4 2.4 Single Processor, and P4 2.4 Dual Processor. It even worked almost as fast on a dual processor P3 450 I had on the throw away shelf. When I got to the 2.4 ghz XEON machine it went downhill, in both Single Processor and Dual Processor options. Don't ask my why. I used the same software as OS (Win 2000 Server SP4) and CF4.5 to test this from clean installs.

I've since upgraded to CF MX 6.1 with stellar results.