Deleted folders reappear after deletion

Problem reported by WaveWorks - 3/30/2015 at 5:18 AM

Submitted

Hello,

Just within the past day I noticed folders I deleted along time ago (like months) have all of a sudden re-appeared back in my mailbox after a SmarterMail service restart. I looked on disk and noticed the folders are still on disk but are empty and contain only a mailbox.cfg. When I delete the folder from the web interface, the folder is never deleted from disk. I looked at some backups over the past several weeks and months, and the folders that all of a sudden reappeared are in the backups but again, are empty and contains only a mailbox.cfg. No configuration changes/upgrades took place that may have caused this, so I'm just wondering what the cause might be. My mailbox is a mess now with several dozen empty folders from the past years

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Employee Replied

3/30/2015 at 8:46 AM

Employee Post

WaveWorks, it sounds like something happened to your root.cfg file so SmarterMail thought it had to rebuild your file structure. Because of the current way in which SmarterMail handles IMAP, a deleted folder still remains on disk even though it is empty (except for the mailbox.cfg file). If root.cfg becomes corrupt or inaccessible for whatever reason on service restart, SM rebuilds the file structure which would include those empty folders.

In the next major version of SM, orphan folders and folder deletion will work completely removed from the file structure.

WaveWorks Replied

3/30/2015 at 9:43 AM

Robert, Thanks for your quick reply. I'll backup the account data, and pull a root.cfg from backup and see if that helps.

JML Replied

4/13/2015 at 1:00 PM

Thanks - had this same issue today. User is reporting they cannont delete those folder tho.

JML Replied

4/13/2015 at 1:00 PM

WaveWorks did the restore from a backup help the end user at all?

Francis Gibbons Replied

1/3/2017 at 4:42 PM

Hey Robert,

I get this all the time customers saying there deleted folders reappear. I run a script to delete all the empty folders from the users mail account. But is there a way to get smartermail to force rebuild the root file? I try by deleting the root file but that doesn't seem to do it.

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