Scheduling Workflow Mailer Stop and Start events as good practice

The Workflow Notification Mailer runs on the generic service called Workflow Mailer Service, which in turn uses the Standard workshift, active 24 hours every day. This means the notification mailer runs non-stop.

 Not allowing the mailer to restart periodically may present some issues:

• The corresponding log file corresponding to the Workflow Mailer Service will grow several gigabytes large and eventually the OS will error due to I/O file handling.
• Some SMTP servers and IMAP servers used for outbound and inbound processing respectively, have time limits to the sessions connected to them. If the mailer reaches those time limits it will encounter a connection error and will be abnormally brought down.
• Similarly the same might happen to the session the mailer establishes to retrieve HTML and framework content from the application server. This is less likely though but it has been seen.
• The size of the INBOX folder in the IMAP server won't get expunged as long as the mailer does not refreshes the session. For a purged INBOX folder it takes the mailer to restart - and for parameter Expunge Inbox on Close to be set to Yes.

In order for the issues above to be minimized, a good practice is to schedule the Mailer to automatically go down and start up periodically, daily preferably. This can be done by using the event schedule feature provided in the Workflow Mailer configuration. This can be done as follows:

First, connect to EBS using the responsibility Workflow Administrator Web Applications and go to Workflow Manager

Then edit the Notification Mailer configuration. Continue going through the train stages until you reach the Schedule Events stage:

In the screen shot above the stopping event is set to happen at 11:50 PM and the starting event at 11:55 PM, and these are set to repeat every using 1440 minutes as the interval. If no interval value is specified the stop/start events are raised just once.