Scalix occasionally loosing / not delevering mail

[SidebandSamurai]

Hello everyone.

I have had a production scalix server up for about 2 months now. Everyone has converted nicely and I am about to move forward with the migration from IMAP to Outlook.

Before I do this, I have had a few users on the new e-mail sever complain to me that they had not recived a certain piece of mail. The count is up to 3 now and at first I thought this was a fluke, but now with 3 e-mail messages missing with out a trace has me concerned. Because it was these 3 that got caught, how many more have turned up missing that nobody missed.

How can I find out what happend to the missing message.

Known Infomation
1. Running Scalix Community Edition 9.4.2 downloaded from website
2. No updates since installation on January 11, 2006
3. Fedora core 4 with all updates applied before scalix installation
3. j2sdk 1.4.2_10
4. 15 users maximum


The symptoms are as follows:
1. Out of all 3 instances, an internal person was sending an e-mail to an internal person.
2. sending person never received an NDR (Non Delevery Report)
3. Receiving person never recived message from sender.
4. Only after sender retreives message from sent box to prove it was sent, does the message finally make it to the receiver.
5. receivers valid e-mail address is in the "TO" field of the forwarded message.
6. Messags were sent with either netscape communicator 7.2, or Thunderbird 1.5
7. When viewing inbox from the web client, the message is NOT there either.

What should I be looking for, what do I need to do to make sure the message get to their intended recepients properly.

Sincerely,

SidebandSamurai

[ScalixSupport]

So are you saying opening the message from the Sent items folder delivered the message to the recipient?

Cheers,

Sascha.

[mikethebike]

I would first check the error queues to see if the original emails have been dumped in there ("omstat -q error", and/or "omstat -q smerr").
Check your audit logs to see if the message was routed correctly, specifically the routing record, and the local delivery record (pay special attention to the "delivered-count" in local delivery)

Do you run omscan on your message store? Does the user have any server-side or client rules in place that may delete the original email?

Mick

[SidebandSamurai]

Sasha,

So are you saying opening the message from the Sent items folder delivered the message to the recipient?

I knew that statement would be a bit confusing.

What I ment to say is the sender would actually stop the receiver in the hall way and say "Hey did you get xxx message". Receiver would say I don't think so, let me check. He would go back to his desk and check and not find the missing message. He would call sender and say "No I did not get the message, did you send it to me?" Sender would say "Yes, here is a copy of the message I sent to you". Sender from the Sent Items box would re-forward the message to the sender. and that is when the sender would finally receive the message, Not the original message, but the forwarded copy.

SidebandSamurai
So no this is'nt like the message was stuck and then when the sender forwarded the original message, the original message appeared. The original message never appears. just the forwarded copy. The forwarded copy shows the original e-mail was addressed correctly just never delevered.

[ScalixSupport]

Go with mikethebike's the suggestion of using the audit log to track the message through. Chapter 22 of the Scalix 10 Administration Guide give you lots of details on how you can configure the logging.

Cheers

Dave

[SidebandSamurai]

Mick,

Does the user have any server-side or client rules in place that may delete the original email?

No they are running off the IMAP services right now, and using the webmail when they are out of the office. I have not installed the outlook connecter yet as that is the last phase of this project.

I would first check the error queues to see if the original emails have been dumped in there ("omstat -q error", and/or "omstat -q smerr").

I ran the above commands with the following results:

Code: Select all

[root@grumpy ~]# omstat -q error
omstat : There are no messages on the queue

[root@grumpy ~]# omstat -q smerr
omstat : [OM.DMON 1011] A queue name specified does not exist.

Check your audit logs to see if the message was routed correctly, specifically the routing record, and the local delivery record (pay special attention to the "delivered-count" in local delivery)

I would like to but don't know how. I have not had a chance to completely go over administration of the server, as they are also in the middle of a office move project and have me busy with stuff other than the e-mail server.

Could you tell me what files to be looking at? or what command is run to show me this information?

Sincerely,

SidebandSamurai

[SidebandSamurai]

Dave,

Go with mikethebike's the suggestion of using the audit log to track the message through.

Ok, that sounds resonable. but now that this has happend, I can not do anything anymore, I have to wait for it to happen again and look at the audit logs. Would that be a correct sumation of what needs to be done?

Chapter 22 of the Scalix 10 Administration Guide give you lots of details on how you can configure the logging.

Scalix 10 Administration guide ??!!! but I am on version 9.4.2 (as stated in my first message) can I still access the Scalix 9 administration guide, and would it be in the same chapter?

Sincerely,

SidebandSamurai

[florian]

I don't have a copy of the 9.4 admin guide at hand, but the chapter on logging will be there - maybe you just want to search for the "omconfaud" command in your pdf.

cheers,
Florian.

[SidebandSamurai]

Hello everyone again,

Sorry for the delay,

Chapter 22 deals with the the Error Manager.

omshowenu revealed the following:

Code: Select all

omshowenu
sxadmin /sbgk,us/CN=sxadmin

as you can see the error manager is pre-confiigured to send nondeliverable messages to the sxadmin account. Logging into the sxadmin account revealed 30 messages not delevered. Out of the 30 messages present only 2 of which were important. The other 28 messages were junk mail to employees not at the company anymore. One message was not addresed at all which I ignored. The other had two '@' symbols in the address. I spoke with the user with the two '@' symbols and she had already corrected that problem and resent the message.

I did not find the missing message from a departing employee to a coworker.

Chapter 22 only delt with the error manager which appears correctly configured. It did not give me instructions on how to configure logging.

Sincerely,

Sideband Samurai
that the error manager is configured to send messages to sxadmin

[florian]

Well, please don't quote me on the chapter number, but there is a chapter on logging in your book and it's one of the last chapters, so it should be easy to find. If you have the PDF version flying around, just search for "omshowlog" - it should be around that command.

Checking the Error Managers inbox for error messages is also a good idea, btw.,

Florian