Disappearing Wastbasket Items

[Derek]

As the subject suggests, users are experiencing items disappearing from their wastebaskets. Now, I have omtidyallu running that is supposed to delete Recovery items, but as far as I can find, that is the only thing I have setup to automatically remove items.

Here is what I have in my crontab:

Code: Select all

# Delete messages in the recovery folder older than 8 days
0 0 * * * root omtidyallu -Tr -a 8 -d -k


Does anyone see any reason why this command would be deleting items out of the Wastebasket? It looks right to me.

Is there something else that may be doing this? I've looked but can't seem to find anything.

Thanks in advance.

[Valerion]

In Outlook the WB is by default cleaned daily. Right click on the Deleted Items and check AutoDelete.

[Derek]

That isn't the cause. It's not the whole wastebasket is emptying, emails are lost from the wastebasket over the course of a few days.

I've had people complain about this and have explained that they shouldn't be using the Deleted Items folder as an organizational tool, but I get a lot of "well that's the way I do it".

Anyway, I need to figure out why this is happening.

[Valerion]

It won't delete everything, but it will age them after a while. Try setting that delay higher to see if it is causing the email loss. That and omtidyallu is the only cases where the server will actively delete anything on its own.

You can check for UAL_NO_WB_EMPTY on page 201 of the admin guide, but then your users WILL run into space issues. If they use the WB as a filling cabinet, they will never clean it themselves and you will end up with an enormous mail store, or if you impose limits with full mailboxes. At least that is my experience.

I suggest taking their wastebasket, placing it on their desk and emptying their inbox on the desk into it. Maybe that will drive the point home ...

[Derek]

The description of that options leads me to believe that clearing the Wastebasket is something automatic. Is that right?

[Valerion]

Yes, this is automated

[Derek]

I don't think I meant "automatic". What I meant to ask was, is this the way Scalix is configured to work "out of the box"?

[les]

I don't think I meant "automatic". What I meant to ask was, is this the way Scalix is configured to work "out of the box"?

Yep, out of the box it will delete mail from deleted items. I found this out the hard way long ago. A crazy default value in my opinion!!!

Thats why the first thing i do on all my sites is set "UAL_NO_WB_EMPTY=TRUE" in the general.cfg

auto-deleting emails should be an administrators choice, not a default out of the box setup.

[Valerion]

Well, true I suppose, but I have also ran into far too many "my mailbox is full" or "my disk ran out of space" issues. Also, back in the days when there was a 32000 item limit in a folder I had some crashes this way myself. So I keep it as the default and make sure the administrator of the site I am installing at gets told about it.

AFAIK Exchange does the same, but with a different default value? Could be mistaken.