nested Public Folders, Mails disappeared

[PeterR]

Hi @all ,

strange problem on 11.2 Community Edition with Public Folders.

User moved one Email into one subfolder inside a Public Folder
-> suddently all messages; roundabout 800; disappeared, only 4 survived.
-> User use Thunderbird Client (2.0.0.9) and is creator of this Public Folder

Missing messages are :
* not shown in SWA,
* not shown to other users which have access right to the public folder
* not shown, regardless which client users use ( Mailclient or SWA )

No Errors with omshowlog -e and even up to level 15
No fatal.log in /var/opt/scalix/xx/s/logs
omscan -v -b shows no Error or Orphans, same result with -A switch.
Did not run omscan with -f mode for fixing.

According to omshowbb they are no expiry date sets, and there was no omtidy script running which could cause this.
( Otherwise I'll expect that other folders should also "lost" some emails ... )

Archiver deamon is running but he's not configured to archive emails.
Noone with Outlook accessed this Public Folder.

OS-Filesystem is healthy and enough space available on device used for scalix.

How can I figure out what exactly happens and how could those missing messages be restored/retrieved ?

Are there any logfile which logs the imap commands send to the scalix server ?

TIA, PeterR

P.S: It's the second time that email's disappeard from one folder, the first time it was an users inbox, but this could be pop3-to-imap-migration related.

[mikethebike]

Peter,

I have seen this before with corrupt messages placed on BBs.
You may want to use omcontain to check the contents of the BB. removing the message the user placed there coul;d resolve the issue.

Mick

[timkeen]

Been running Scalix for a while, started with 10.0.x, and never had a problem. Upgraded to 11.2 so I could use the Outlook connector, and have had nothing but trouble with public folders since. To being with, I've had a real problem keeping folders in sync between Outlook and SWA. Some messages would show in one and not the other. Resetting the smart cache would help, but only until a message would get dragged and dropped from one client or the other. I finally got tired of messing with it and gave up on Outlook, and have been using only SWA.

Last week, though, I dragged and dropped a subfolder that resided in a public shared folder, into a private folder. At the time, the subfolder came over just fine, and all subfolders and messages within it appeared to be intact. The subfolder was removed from the public shared folder. HOWEVER, when I logged out of SWA and back in, EVERYTHING (several hundred messages) was gone from both the private and public folders. Where did these go? Hundreds of messages. Gone.

Like Peter, I ran all kinds of scans and file system checks, and no errors are reported. Plenty of disk space, etc. All messages in that folder seemed to have vaporized. Any clues? At this point I have zero confidence in public shares on 11.x, and will not store anything there until I figure this out. I'm also concerned that this problem may pop up on the private folders. If it does, I'll have no choice but to roll back Scalix 10. Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

[kanderson]

If you're seeing problems this severe, I'd recommend opening a support incident with Scalix to get it resolved quickly and accurately.

Kev.

[timkeen]

Digging around in the forums some more, I found a reference to corruption of the imap-cache folder. I backed up the user using omcpoutu, even backed up the user's imap-cache folder, then deleted everything in it. After logging back in, all the missing sub-folders and emails appeared. So, that explains why omscan, etc., found no errors with the message store.

I'm happy the messages are back, but wondering if I shouldn't put a script in place to periodically delete the imap-cache. I still have issues with the Outlook Connector and SWA keeping things in sync, and wonder if it isn't the same issue (related to the imap-cache). Oddly, though, I only see that problem on public folders and not private ones. Perhaps multiple users accessing and updating the same shares using the connector corrupted the cache for that share, then me dragging and dropping the folder to a private folder simply carried the problem along with it. Anyone else have a similar experience.

[kanderson]

My gut feel is that Imap corruption stems from accessing a single mail profile using multiple clients. I can't say that for sure, as I've never tested it, but it would appear so.

What you're describing would certainly seem to lend credibility to that guess...

Kev.