Yesterday we had a freak outage of database mail. Our SQL Server 2005 on our Server 2008 machine decided to just queue up all the mail, and not send anything out for several hours.

There were a few errors in the database mail log, like Mail Server not responding, but I verified at the time the mail server was fine. Plus the errors ended hours prior but no mail was going out.

Here’s my simple fix. Using query anaylizer I checked the items in the mail queue by running the following on the MSDB database:

exec sysmail_help_queue_sp @queue_type = ‘Mail’ ;

To double check the actual items, I ran the following query:

SELECT top 500 * FROM sysmail_allitems where sent_date > DATEADD(day, -1, getDate()) order by sent_date DESC

Once I was satisified that it was the database mail’s failure and not my application or the webservice, I did the scary task of hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL on the server, and killing “DatabaseMail90.exe”. It instantly restarted itself and proceeded to send out all items in the queue. It’s been fine ever since.

I did the end process because no matter what restart command I could find it would not respond, it was just hang there. So, this seemed to work quite well.