PeopleTools 8.51 & Exchange 2010: Part 1, The Problem

Our Exchange servers were upgraded last month from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010.  In TAM the recruiters have a process to close a job request, and it will send email to each of the applicants. This process can send out hundreds of emails.

As soon as they upgraded the mail server to Exchange 2010, the recruiters started seeing a big slowdown in their process. We traced it back to a five second delay for each email at the Exchange 2010 server. The Exchange server admins said the "PS application server is requesting the connection to stay open with a NOOP command. There is no response to close connection within 5 seconds so exchange closes that connection. 2003 ignores this basically due to tarpit functionality is not a feature on 2003 which noop is triggering on 2010."  Appropriate to its name, the tarpit is meant to slow down an automated process that a spammer might use.  You can read more on the Tarpitinterval here.

What does this issue have to do with PeopleTools 8.51?  If we were back on PeopleTools 8.49.10, we would not have this problem.  Starting in PT 8.49.12 the application servers now use Javamail to send out email.  Before that point, the application server used Sendmail, which didn't leave the connection open with a NOOP.  Javamail is part of the mail.jar file, and for this version of tools, the version of Javamail is 1.3.3 (this is important later).

BTW, the other PeopleSoft processes that send email have the same five second per email delay, but they don't send hundreds of emails.