Hi John
All it is doing is executing a cfmail command once every 10 seconds. (The 'sleep' command doesn't take up CPU cycles, from what I understand about that command). Not knowing anything about your architecture, I would still venture a guess that it is a total non-issue unless you are running on an i286 ;-)
Speaking for my systems, as a resource hit, it is not even on the radar ... our CF server is running serious DB queries, generating dynamic web pages, searches, forms, etc plus our normal CFMail commands (many bulk sends a day). For us, one more individual CFMail every ten seconds would not even show up on the radar. And the scheduler? I already have over 50 scheduled tasks running from there, so one more for us is, again, insignificant. Just my two cents, please prove to yourself.
Also, speaking from my own experiences, I was not able to replicate the 'vanished email' bug when sending locally to my IIS/SMTP server ... ie: installed on the same server as my CF. (I mentioned all that in my earlier detailed post on this thread). I should have mentioned that as 'workaround #3' now that I think about it, since it appears (from my testing) that open CF mail connections established LOCALLY do not get corrupted. Thus, YOU could setup IIS/SMTP on your CF server and relay your mail through it and workaround the bug that way. (My guess is that the "connections" that CF keeps open works locally, but timeout (or get corrupted) when extablished remotely, and that the bug happens because CF fails to recognize these corrupted "open" connections. But that is pure speculation on my part).
I would recommend you run the testing program (provided in my first post on this thread) and find out for yourself if my hunch is correct (that no mail is vanished by CF when sent to IIS/SMTP setup on the same box as your CF). And then you would have another workaround.
And you might be asking, why didn't I use that workaround myself (instead of my "scheduled cfmail script" workaround)?? For two reasons: I hate the logging on IIS/SMTP (talk about obtuse!) plus, we actually DO relay some of our CFMail bulk mail through our local IIS/SMTP server (but send all our non-bulk mail through our external server). That way, if the IIS/SMTP server gets blacklisted by an overly sensitive blacklisting ageny, then at least our sensitive "must get delivered" email is routed through a mail server that never gets blacklisted (bulk mail can annoy blacklisting agencies, no matter how legit it is, so I have learned to deal with it and protect ourselves).
Hope that is useful info,
Byron