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Lost E-mail

Richard Bruce

Lost E-mail
« on: February 22, 2002, 03:24:17 PM »
Hi,
I've just started having an extremely strange problem on our SME5.0 r3 box. No-one is receiving any new mail into their own mailbox (either POP or IMAP) but instead further copies of emails already sent appear to be looping.

If I check the maillog there is a lot of new mail coming in, and apparently being delivered, but it is not making it through to the users. I've now got 9 copies of a group of emails and it's growing! Again qmail current shows lots of mail coming in and being delivered, but I can't get at it.

Has anyone ever experienced this? Any pointers as to where I should be looking? I've been at this for 5 hours now and I'm starting to go bald!

Richard Bruce

Richard Bruce

Re: Lost E-mail
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2002, 03:48:51 PM »
A bit of further information. All "local" emails (i.e. within the same system) appear to be OK, it's just incoming mail that's affected. Oujtgoing appears to be fine. We receive mail currently via Multidrop. I've been running this system for over a year (albeit on 4.1.1, 4.1.2 and 5.0) with no major problems. thanks for any suggestions.

Richard Bruce

Re: Lost E-mail
« Reply #2 on: February 22, 2002, 04:39:37 PM »
Some more info :-)

In the qmail/current log I can see the same block of messages looping again and again.
The message numbers always remain the same, but the delivery numbers are always different. Can anyone tell me what programs generate these numbers as it might help me identify what is causing the loop. I'm now up to 14 copies of these messages!

Richard

Richard Bruce

Re: Lost E-mail
« Reply #3 on: February 22, 2002, 05:03:17 PM »
Hmmm,

I've found 5 old files in /var/spool/smtpd/spool that don't ever seem to have been delivered. Can I delete these? Still no closer to a solution on the looping mail though.

Richard

daithikuk

Re: Lost E-mail
« Reply #4 on: February 22, 2002, 06:11:28 PM »
i had a similar problem a while back, but i couldn't receive internal emails either - turned out to be a permissions problem on my home directorys.
don't know if this helps, but hope it does...Richard Bruce wrote:

Richard Bruce

Re: Lost E-mail
« Reply #5 on: February 25, 2002, 04:51:28 PM »
Just to close this off.

It appears the problem was caused by our ISP timing out our ISDN dialup connection!

What would happen is that e-smith would dial up to receive mail, would start downloading it and then the connection would drop after 72 minutes (why 72 I don't know, but that seems to have been the limit imposed). Unfortunately not all of the email was downloaded in that time (we had over 100Mb waiting to be downloaded). The e-smith server would then distribute what it could then dial up again. Unfortunately the ISP had not marked the POP messages as having been downloaded, so then proceeded to download everything again. This is what caused the looping effect. My only guess to the disappearing e-mail is that the header was being downloaded, but because the rest of the message didn't complete the partial messages were discarded.

Can anyone tell me if this is an accurate guess, or just bunkum?

Thanks again

Richard