6
Missing Emails Again
Problem reported by T Lewis - 3/13/2015 at 3:58 PM
Submitted
Well we got off to a rocky start about a month ago with one of our clients ending up missing emails and we fixed it by moving them to one of our hosted Exchange servers.
 
We decided to give it a try again and another customer and this migration went better most likely because this customer was still on an Exchange server vs the other customer only has their .pst files.
 
They have been working fine for about 3 weeks now, but now one of the users are now missing emails.
 
In Outlook 2013 (IMAP Only account) they can see their sub folders under the inbox, but the emails in all the sub folders are missing.  When we log into the Smartermail interface as that user they can see the default folders, but the sub folders do not show up at all.
 
We have stopped the SmarterMail Service. In Windows Explorer, navigate to a folder missing mail (ex: C:\SmarterMail\Domains\[DOMAIN]\Users\[USER]\Mail\Inbox\[FOLDERNAME] Delete the mailbox.cfg file located in this folder. Restart the SmarterMail service.
 
Still no sub folders the Smartermail interface and no emails in Outlook but the sub folders are still there.
 
We have opened a support ticket.
 
Anyone else having issue with Smartermail loosing emails or having an issue with sub folders?
If so any resolution to the issues?

70 Replies

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Paul Blank Replied
Is this with the current version of SM?
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T Lewis Replied
This is with version 13.2
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Paul Blank Replied
I am watching this thread (and others) because I've been putting off upgrading to SM 13.x (still on 11, which is very stable). This does not appear to be a common issue. Curious that the folders show up in Outlook but not SM, so perhaps a corrupt user in SM. I keep full archiving on in SM so that any missing emails can be restored (because this surely happens on occasion for a variety of reasons - yours is kinda new to me), and do full+ daily incremental backups as well.
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T Lewis Replied
We are running version 11 for our personal emails, and I have two clients that I service with version 12. We have been offering Exchange hosting at our data center and wanted to offer an Exchange alternative so we purchased the Enterprise edition version 13 and have had the missing email issue from the get go and had to migrate our first customers that wanted to try the alternative to Exchange because of the missing email issue. We decided to give it a try again and this time it looks like things were going pretty good and then missing emails. What we have narrowed this down to so far the common thing is emails missing in sub folders, the first time it with a customer with ActiveSync, this time it is with IMAP only account, but both times it is only in the sub folders. How is the performance with archiving turned on? We do full backups daily so hopefully we will be able to bring back the emails.
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Paul Blank Replied
Our server is lightly-loaded - about 35 users on S2003-x64 and 8GB RAM, but I've had no performance issues that I can attribute to archiving, which has been turned on since the beginning. And we use symantec.cloud for filtering, so we are not using the anti-spam service; this I'm sure lightens the load on the server.
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T Lewis Replied
Thank you the info. I think we will start looking into the archiving. I will post any updates on our issue as they come available.
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T Lewis Replied
Just posting an update. Nothing from Smartermail tech support yet, it's going on 6 days since opening the ticket. Client is about to leave. If I do not hear back from tech support with a resolution to this issue I will most likely roll them over to our hosted Exchange. So far not impressed with the product or the support.
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T Lewis Replied
Still nothing from Smartermail tech support on this issue.
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T Lewis Replied
Still nothing from Smartermail tech support about what may have caused the missing emails and sub folders or how to recover. 8th day so far.
 
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Paul Blank Replied
Hopefully you have been able to restore the missing folders.  It typically isn't too difficult to re-integrate those emails into SM after restoring them.
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T Lewis Replied
Not yet, we have not had any real direction or progress from Smartermail tech support on getting this issue resolved.
 
We have mounted a pst file of her emails from backup so she has access to her emails.
 
We will most likely move them to our Exchange servers and shutdown Smartermail due to reliability issues and poor Smartermail tech support of the product and stop offering it as an option. 
 
What a shame, we did have high hopes for the product, and were very excited about having another option other then Exchange for our hosted email services.  Having two different clients suffer the same issue of missing emails with only a month into using the product and both times poor support from Smartermail is enough.
 
Thank you for your feedback in trying to help with our issue.
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T Lewis Replied
Heard back from Smartermail tech support, it seems that they are confused with the first ticket we opened that also was about missing emails, (Read top of post) but that ticket was closed due to lack of support and we had no chose but to move out client to Exchange.
 
From tech support:
 
Sorry for the delay.  Currently I don't have an explaination of why importing a PST file would cause an issue.  If you'd like to FTP me that file, I can test this locally.
You can ZIP and fTP the file to the following location:
 
The ticket is not about a .pst file, it is about an Exchange account that was migrated through the Smartermail migration tool and everything went fine.  The account was working good for 3 weeks without issue.  Then the user noticed that her sub folders show in Outlook but the emails are missing and when she logs into the Smartermail webmail interface it does not even show the sub folders and of course the emails are missing.
 
It has been 10 days since opening the ticket and no where closer to resolving the issue then the day that we opened the ticket.
 
So I had to break it down to a nice simple list of questions for them.
 
1. Why did Smartermail loose the sub folders and emails?

1a. If this is a bug, when will a fix be available?

2. How do I proceed to resolve this issue to recover the sub folders and emails?
 
 
 
2
Paul Blank Replied
I am NOT making excuses for ST/SM or their actions regarding your case.  In my experience, Outlook is a moving target, and a very difficult product to deal with, especially when you take into account the various versions of Outlook that have appeared over the years, with different configurations and very different behavior.
 
That said, I've experienced strangeness with Thunderbird and other IMAP clients as well on SM - not exactly as you've described but I have seen missing and corrupted emails.  Luckily it doesn't happen that often.
 
It's also no big surprise that Outlook is more reliable talking "Exchange" to an Exchange server, indeed it should be at least as reliable, if not more so, than any other arrangement. However, I have no direct experience with that arrangement.
 
As stated previously, I've always found it good practice to archive all emails AND make daily backups of the mail server.
My thinking is that errors will occur, and it's better to be fully prepared for when these glitches happen.
 
 
 

 
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T Lewis Replied
I heard back from Smartermail tech support here it is:
 
Have you checked the 'IMAP Folders' icon in Outlook and verified that all of your folders in webmail are being subscribed to in MS Outlook?
 
I Replied back with the following:
****************************************************************************************
Yes, we have tried that but that does not explain why the Smartermail webmail interface does not show the sub folders or the emails.

So we are clear and do not have to keep going over this.

The account was working fine for 3 weeks and then is lost the sub folders and emails.

From the Smartermail webmail interface the sub folders and emails are missing
From Outlook connected using IMAP shows the sub folders but the emails are missing.

If it was an migration issue it should have not shown the sub folders or emails for 3 weeks.
If I cannot see the sub folders or emails in the Smartermail webmail interface, but can see the sub folders in Outlook, I would have to think Outlook is just caching the sub folders and they really are not there since Smartermail does not see the sub folders, Outlook I assume would be any easy fix of just deleting the IMAP profile and re-creating it again, I would bet it would then not show the sub folders.

This still means we have an issue so let's just focus on this one thing at this point to make it easy for you..

The Smartermail webmail interface.

Issue: The sub folders and emails are missing
 
***************************************************************************************
 
 
I am calling SmarterTools right now to see if I can have someone else work on this ticket..
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T Lewis Replied
OK we are getting somewhere now, I called and asked to have another tech assigned to this ticket.
 
The new tech told me that Smartermail has a KB about sub folders.
Here it is:
 
We have a knowledge base article address this issue: (Your account does not have permission to use hyperlinks in post)
 
Just waiting for him to respond to how to proceed to recover the sub folders and emails from backup without overwriting existing emails that have come in since the start of the issue 11 days ago.
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Paul Blank Replied
If I'm not missing something here, the way I would (probably) do this is to first restore the emails/folders to a non-SM folder. Then place the recovered emails in different SM folders than the ones in which they originally lived. .
 
There are notes out there explaining how to bring those emails back into SM, some with and some without stopping/re-starting the SM services.
 
After making sure you can see those emails in SM, move them to the correct folders. If the missing emails are from a certain date range, you can sort the restored messages by date, and only move the ones that are from the affected dates.  
 
 
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Jayson Baker Replied
Well what is the link? Seems their own software is preventing you from posting the help! Ugh!
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JML Replied
Has there been a solution to this issue?  I realize this post is old.  Every 4-6 months I have one IMAP users I just have to create a new profile for him.  He will click the folder and after 2 seconds all the messages disappear in the box.  You click off the folder and back it will shower a select few.  Sounds like a similar issue.
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Mike Roe Replied
I have had  many clients with this issue and removed the Windows update 3097877.  Microsoft sent this out and then removed it after problems like this.  They changed it and resent it out with the same number. "Stupid" 
 
I have had good success with removing this update
1
Employee Replied
Employee Post
Hello all.  For users still experiencing an issue with missing emails, I would recommend making sure you're running our latest build of SmarterMail 14, available for download here.
If you're still experiencing an issue with missing messages, please let us know.
1
Bruce Barnes Replied
Thanks for the new build, Rod.  Contains some very important fixes and improvements!
Bruce Barnes ChicagoNetTech Inc brucecnt@comcast.net Phonr: (773) 491-9019 Phone: (224) 444-0169 E-Mail and DNS Security Specialist Network Security Specialist Customer Service Portal: https://portal.chicagonettech.com Website: https://www.ChicagoNetTech.com Security Blog: http://networkbastion.blogspot.com/ Web and E-Mail Hosting, E-Mail Security and Consulting
1
JML Replied
Thanks Rod and Mike. I tried uninstalling that update and also installed the latest and greatest version of SM. The user still is only showing some of the emails in his Outlook 2013 IMAP folders. When looking on the website it shows all the messages.

I know a band-aid is to create a new profile and re-sync everything. However this happens every few months so I'm done going down that path. Hoping to find the cause and solution to the real issue.

Thanks!
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JML Replied
Rod, Is this being looked into further? Thank you!
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Ritesh Kakkad Replied
I had update Smartermail Version 14.5, Now i found few users mail is missing/Deleted.
I had inform smartermail regarding this also requested to generate logs for deleted and missing mail to find out issue.
 
Anil
 
 
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Kenneth Knudsen Replied
I have just discovered an issue with mail archive, and is curious if anybody else have experienced similar.
 
A user complains about missing emails, so I check the mail archive with the specifics he gave me. Sender and receiver address and the date. The archive shows 0 emails !!
 
I go ahead and check the log for the same day and here I see at least 10 emails going back and forth between the email addresses specified by the user.
 
Archiving has been set to save email in both directions !!
 
This is really bad news for our SmarterMail installation. We are running the latest release... This particular customer have had so many issues, we consider leaving for a MS product. This customer already left for a MS product...
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Paul Blank Replied
Definitely suspect when you say that NONE of those emails are in the archive...
 
Did you try a broader search, such as start date one day before, and end date one day after the date(s) you want, and just the first 4 or 5 characters of the SM user's address in the appropriate to or from field? You don't need the @ or domain name to perform these searches.
 
I understand that the results may show more than what you're looking for, but it can be helpful to see if those emails are actually in the archive. In several years of administering SM, I have yet to verify an instance where an email wasn't in the archive after being sent or received by a SmarterMail user, where archiving was properly set up.
 
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Kenneth Knudsen Replied
Hi Paul, I have now searched from 12th of February (where the customer was added to our Smarter Mail) and until today (customer was migrated away from the Smarter Mail 21st of march) .. and i did search the message archive with only Lisa as the sender and Steve as the receiving and I get not email in the archive.....

If I search only for Steve as receiving I get hits in the archive, but not the emails in question !!!

How can you not setup archiving correct?

You specify a path and specify what to save to the archive. Inbound, outbound or everything.

We have the archive on a Synology with 5 drives and a 600 GB iSCSI share mapped for the sole purpose of email archiving. Only server with access to this drive is the Smarter Mail server.

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Paul Blank Replied
Well that is just plain scary, then. I am at a loss to explain. Believe me, I've had my issues with SM, but this is a new one.
 
And yeah, I guess it's difficult to not set archiving up correctly. Excuse my phraseology. 
 
The next step (IMO) would be to get whatever emails you can from this "conversation", with full headers, from the recipient, and send them to ST, along with the relevant SM log info, to see if they can suss this out.
 
I am most curious to see what comes of this.
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Kenneth Knudsen Replied
And I did a little searching on other domains and I also see mails in the log not in the archive.... So I will spend some time tomorrow and find out how widespread this problem is... And will also try to make a archive directly on the Smarter Mail server to rule out the Synology iSCSI setup.
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Paul Blank Replied
I guess it's possible that the NAS device is the issue. Since it's not a native Windows file system, it could somehow be ignoring filenames (or other file structure related stuff) that do not comply with Windows specs, or could even, I suppose, be the result of non-Microsoft-compliant protocol issues.
 
Of course that could mean that SM is (possibly) simply dropping the file(s) into the specified location without verifying that it was correctly written.
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Kenneth Knudsen Replied
And now i started testing IMAP vs. EAS ....
 
A specified user have according to Smarter Mail reporting a mailbox size of 4,378 MB  (4.3GB)
 
So i configured an Outlook 2013 client for this user and setup 2 different accounts: IMAP and EAS
 
The weird thing is that i get different mail box size reported after full sync.
 
IMAP reports:  3.4 GB
EAS reports: 2.77 GB
 
I would expect the EAS mailbox to be a little bigger as it sync contacts, calendar and notes as well.
 
I have tried to force sync several times on both protocols but the difference remains...
 
Something is really wrong here...
 
I will find a Outlook 2010 installation and try the same user again on IMAP as Smarter Mail and Outlook 2010 are not able to do EAS.
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Paul Blank Replied
Kenneth, have you any improvement with the missing emails problem since moving the archive off of the Synology box?
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Kenneth Knudsen Replied
I'm still testing...
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luis antonio dueñas cruz Replied
Today I have a problem whit missing emails.
 
Customer call and said , that user1 sent email to user2 and user3, in the same domain, but the user 2 and user3 dindt receive email.
 
I try to reproduce the problem.
send a mail from user1 to user2 , received.
send a mail from user1 to user3 , received.
send a mail from user1 to user2&user3, received.
send the email whit attachment, received.
send the original not received mail, and problem reproduced, email not received. Check the log, and the log show that it was delivered same log for each user.
delivery log
[2016.04.11] 14:53:19 [03471] Delivery for user1@domain to user2@domain has completed (Delivered) Filter: None
[2016.04.11] 14:53:19 [03471] Delivery finished for user1@domain at 2:53:19 PM [id:60103471]
 
smtp log
[2016.04.11] 14:53:10 [187.220.53.155][47704822] rsp: 354 Start mail input; end with <CRLF>.<CRLF>
[2016.04.11] 14:53:11 [187.220.53.155][47704822] rsp: 250 OK
[2016.04.11] 14:53:11 [187.220.53.155][47704822] Data transfer succeeded, writing mail to 60103471.eml
[2016.04.11] 14:53:13 [187.220.53.155][47704822] cmd: QUIT
[2016.04.11] 14:53:13 [187.220.53.155][47704822] rsp: 221 Service closing transmission channel
[2016.04.11] 14:53:13 [187.220.53.155][47704822] disconnected at 4/11/2016 2:53:13 PM
so the log say yes but no email in the inbox, so I load the gpr file into a notepad and there is no reference for this email.
 
I resend the email adding a third email in the to field, and received.
After that no longer able to rerpoduce the problem again, but the customer had the problem all morning , and the credibility for the email is decreasing. The version is 14.4.5801 .
I think the user only notice of this because he was sending to the next chair coworker.
l'm goint to upgrade this weekend , but i SM needs to improve the reliability.
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David Cooper Replied
This is an old thread, but we are having trouble with missing emails also, for months now. Has anyone else found a cause?
We have been running Smartermail for a few years now, and have moved a lot of our clients onboard to our 'hosted mail system', this is now causing some grief with our clients.
One of the issues is, intermittently, when an email is viewed and then deleted or moved to another folder in outlook 2013 or outlook 2016. the email will be removed from the inbox, but not be visible in the deleted items or subfolder, essentially it has disappeared, but only in the email client.
if I log in to webmail, the email is still sitting in the inbox, if I then move the email from the inbox the email will then reappear on the email client.
There have been a instances where emails that have arrived into smartermail, but have not appeared in the outlook. the client hasn't seen they email has arrived.
We also see the unread emails in the outlook inbox and webmail are different for most clients, there is no easy way to compare to see which emails in webmail have not appeared in outlook
We have several clients now which have lost confidence in our 'hosted mail solution' for them and want to move, we have putting them off for months now, saying we are working with the developers to get it resolved, however, we have had nothing proactive from smartertools, they haven't acknowledge that this is a known issue, or been offered a work around or any solution for month since this ticket was opened.
Unfortunately we have setup a part of our cloud business around Smartermail, along with marketing material and have actively moving our clients to smartermail. now we have a product we cannot promote with confidence knowing there are issues, we have had to move one client already and have two more wanting to move away. Extremely disappointing and frustrating.
Is anyone else having similar issues? has anyone else found a reason why this is happening
 
 
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Paul Blank Replied
This appears to be a problem that's Outlook-specific. I lost a good SM client when the SM program would not play nicely with Outlook.
 
Alas, this seems to be an ongoing saga.
 
With another client, who trusts me enough that I can control what email clients are used, I forbid the use of Outlook, and have not had these issues with SM. We use a combination of SM Webmail, Thunderbird, and, for a few holdouts, POP3 on Eudora (gasp!) , plus a variety of smartphone email clients.
 
 
 
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David Cooper Replied
Unfortunately Smartermail is marketed as an exchange alternative product, selling the hosting package to clients and informing them they cannot use the Microsoft outlook tools they are familiar with and have already paid for makes this a much harder sell. Clients don't like change
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Paul Blank Replied
David, you get no argument from me there.
 
Unfortunately (to use your word again) Outlook is a moving target. Microsoft has changed the way that Outlook works so often that it can make one's head spin, and email admins are left holding the bag.
 
Customers, of course, don't want to hear about it; they just want their email to work.
 
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David Cooper Replied
Would be happy to stay with a specific version of outlook 2013 and turn off updates if this solved the issue, until it gets sorted, but we have no direction from smartertools here, we have upgraded one of the client's computers from office 2013 to 2016 to see if this would alleviate the problem, which it didn't. We are desperate to get a stable solution, using outlook, this takes up way to much of our time now, I am reluctant to loose this part of my business and have been so far, delaying the inevitable. We have (now) moved two of our clients to Microsoft hosted mail so we don't loose their other business. On the verge of moving the third, which is very disappointing after working on this move to us for a year with this client.
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David Cooper Replied
Completely frustrating situation, We get NO regular contact from Smartertools regarding our tickets and most ticket posts are not replied to. This issue has been a ticket for over 6 months and we have no solution.
We have already written off $3000 in labor costs for two clients and now have had to agree to what will be close to $5000 in labor costs to moving our largest client back to in house hosting after selling them the hosted mail solution.
We are a small business, we have set this up as one of our key products in our range, we are in the situation now we have dozens of smaller clients on board and are getting more and more who are noticing emails are just disappearing on them.
In most cases we have spent months convincing our clients to move to our hosted mail Exchange compatible solution, charged a fair amount of labor to perform the move and migration of old email, now, in order to keep our clients, we are having to agree to cover the labor costs to move their data back to an in house system.
We have been put in this very difficult position by the lack of proactive support and lack of communication from Smartertools. our ticket posts largely go unanswered, I assume by the lack of response from Smartertools that the smartermail solution is not where want to focus their time and is likely and end of life product.
Is there anyone else in this situation? Have you found a reliable successor to smartermail?
 
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Matthew Titley Replied
Would you be willing to share some specs on your SM environment? I don't ask in any troubleshooting assistance manner but merely so I can compare with the server/network/software environment which we run. I have been a ST/SM customer for about 10 years and, overall, am happy with the performance and reliability. I'm sure that if I were in your shoes I wouldn't have much of a warm and fuzzy feeling. I'd just like to see if there are substantial deviations from our (knock on wood) historically robust setup.

My biggest concern regarding your post is the seemingly slow tech support response time. When something goes horribly wrong, I would expect prompt and focused support, just as my clients demand from my company.

Thanks,

Matt
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Paul Blank Replied
I agree, Matt. Would like to hear ST's response to this.
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David Cooper Replied
I Run Smartermail in a VM with 2 x x64 2GHz cores and 12Gb Ram and 900Gb Storage, keeping an eye on the average CPU and memory usage it seldom goes above 15-20%. I have run (happily) smartermail for 2-3 years now and have had a good run up until earlier this year where some clients and myself have noticed emails disappearing, Sometimes the emails have gone completely, often It happens in Outlook 2013 and 2016 the emails still exist inside Smartermail, but have gone from outlook.
I created a support ticket on the 1st of June, We had a few ticket responses to start with but these have dropped off, for the first few months we had no indication if this was a known issue or something unique to us.
Only after posting on the public forums, did I get a response indicating this a known issue they were working on.
We need some resolution to this, We have lost 3 big clients at huge cost to me and are now just waiting as other clients contact us to let us know that emails have disappeared.
We pride ourselves on responsive support for our clients but are completely in the hands of Smartertools here.
 
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Bugs and issues happen with every company!  Microsoft just had to roll and update out for Office365 for an email missing issue.  
 
Many of Microsoft's release last year and early this year for Outlook 2013 and 2016 have had issues.  We have been very open about what items we could work around and what we reporeted to Microsoft.
 
The issue you submitted wasn't a "Known" issue until we started evaluating the problem and discovered there was an issue.... and I have been briefed on the issue and we believe it is related to moving messages from sent items to another folder via EAS on Outlook 2013 and 2016.  It is being evaluated.
 
Each and every ticket is evaluated by the support team and responded to rapidly.  It is then moved to the development team which attempts to duplicate the issue and understand the pattern which causes the problem.  This can take time because either we do it in our environment or we wait for it to reoccur on a customers server with proper logging etc.  
 
We then release a fix for the customer or customers and then roll them into final releases.
 
And, to reference someones comment about not using Microsoft Outlook.  There were times that Microsoft had signficant bugs in Microsoft Outlook (unrelated to us)... down to simply adding multiple accounts at the same time and Outlook would get the two accounts confused.  
 
My personal expereince...  Microsoft Outlook is my primary email client with over 100,000+ emails and 15 gigs across many mailboxes. In addition, I connect clients from iOS, Android, MacOS to ensure syncronization is solid across clients, operating systems, and protcols.  Basically, I attempt to make myself the worse case scenario.  As clients continue to change and protocols get updated and revamped we constantly make changes to accomidate etc.  You will find the same expereince with all other Mail Servers and Office365.  As I said, Microsoft just had to patch all of Office365 for mail issues.
 
Tim Uzzanti
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Paul Blank Replied
They used to say "you can't get fired for buying IBM" (pcs, for example). Similarly with Microsoft. Having it "all" be Microsoft's fault (Exchange + Outlook) is an "easy" out because they're one of the "800-pound gorillas." We are not so lucky with Smartermail + Outlook, and many of us have similar stories about losing clients because of Outlook issues.
 
I haven't seen any further issues regarding emails missing from the archive as well, and I've not experienced this myself, so (I'm repeating myself here) it remains a great idea to archive all emails. Disk space is cheap, and SM compresses the emails nicely to make them take up even less space.
 
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David Cooper Replied
Its not just moving sent items to another folder, it happens to any mail with any change of attributes, ie, when an email is marked as read, or if an email in the inbox is moved to another folder or deleted. it just 'disappears' from outlook altogether. It appears to be random, and not frequent, it could be 1 email out of 100 over a couple of weeks, for another client it seems to be every couple of days.
In one case the client is receiving a large number of emails during the day, quickly reads them to determine urgency, and in a lot of cases will move them to a subfolder or flag them for follow up later in the day. Once he goes back several hours later, he wont remember every email which should be there, he actions everything and moves on.
Nearly every client we have has a different unread mail count ie 'Inbox 1324' in outlook and Smartermail web client, so going into to webmail to try and locate an email which doesn't exist in outlook demonstrates to the client that there is a whole lot more missing than he realized, doing a line by line compare from outlook to smartermail looking for lost emails is almost futile.
The "Known' issue was known before I submitted the ticket, this wasn't acknowledged to me from the start
We had spent many hours trying to figure out what was happening, thinking it must be something at our end.
I understand that everything has bugs, Once we know they exist we can work with them or around them, its the nature of the business. ie The all day calendar items the would jump to the previous day when created etc, once we know, we can discuss with the client and keep the client managed until the fix is in place.(which it was)
However missing emails has a substantial impact as it is tool that is heavily relied upon for business, the implications of a client missing orders for example, for what could be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because the email disappeared is serious risk.
As it stands, this last client we have lost, we had been holding off for months, explaining that the issue will be resolved, they have lost faith in the product and have instructed us to move them back in house, at our cost.
 
Outlook is buggy, so is every other piece of software out there. but we know that and work with it, the devil you know....
Outlook is by far the most widely used business email client (at least in this part of the world) so suggesting the client move away from this software, purchasing a new email client for every user, installing and training every user in the use of the new software would need a much more compelling case than 'the new software might work better with out hosted mail solution that we are selling you'
what we know...
We didn't appear to have this problem up till previously, somewhere around the beginning of the year. if its due to an update in outlook, let us know which one, we'll remove it, if its another Microsoft update, again, we can block it, until its resolved.
We know Outlook syncs to a hosted smartermail solution and intermittent syncs don't happen and email disappears from outlook
Change outlook to a hosted exchange solution, also using active sync, issue doesn't occur
We know, in smartermail if we find a missing email, we can change an attribute and the email will 'usually' reappear in outlook again.
We know the email still exists in smartermail
We know that IOS and Andriod devices, using active sync work without issue 
 
What we don't know is:
Is Smartertools are any closer to resolving this issue than they were 3 months ago, is there light at the end of the tunnel
Is there a simple work around to initiate activesync to  'resync' a clients inbox manually or via script that has worked for anyone
Is this still being actively worked on by smartertools, should we be waiting for a solution
Does Smartertools know specifically what the issue is? or should we be looking for contributing factors, ie AV, etc at our end?
Matt, have you had any instances similar to this? what does your client base use predominantly as an email client?
 
 
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Matthew Titley Replied
It's a mash of everything I assume. I know I have all flavors of Outlook, EM client, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Windows Mail, Android. Most are IMAP/POP and only a handful of EAS.

I'm on ActiveSync with Outlook 2016. At this moment I'm logged into both Webmail and have Outlook open.

Outlook 2016 inbox shows 4468 unread messages, 6154 total.
SM Webmail inbox shows 6075 unread messages, 7773 total.

Outlook 2016 deleted items 42
SM Webmail deleted items 6984

Well then. Might someone chime in on the discrepancy? I'm trying to get my head around the possibilities and ramifications here. I just emptied delete items via webmail and after a few minutes it synced up with Outlook. This doesn't explain the difference in inbox, does it....

For the record I'm on 15.2.6039 on Win 2012 R2.
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Paul Blank Replied
Another one bites the dust. Just got final word from a (now former) SM client that they have completely transitioned to Office 365 and have no further use for SmarterMail. Ongoing issues with Outlook were cited as the reason.
 
It was due for renewal in a few days.
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Paul Blank Replied
No, it does not explain the difference. In an ideal world, and indeed, the real world, those numbers should match.

Come to think of it, this has been a perfect opportunity (going back some time now) for a company like ST to write its own version of EAS and tell Microsoft to fix theirs... or even sell Microsoft their fix. Just sayin'
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Matthew Titley Replied
I still haven't made up my mind if I'm going to open a ticket on this. Right now on my company's internal network in which the mail server resides on the DMZ, I'm connected to the mail server using EAS on Outlook 2013. My office desktop here on the LAN as well is also connected to the mail server via EAS on Outlook 2016. Same account, of course.
 
Outlook 2016 inbox: 6398 total messages, 4644 unread.
Outlook 2013 inbox: 8017 total messages, 6251 unread.
 
*edit* SM web mail matches Outlook 2013 which does help shed a sliver of light I suppose.
 
In Outlook ActiveSync setup, there really are no options other than credentials and how much email to keep offline which I have set to keep all.
 
Matt
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Employee Replied
Employee Post
Hi Matt.  I think you should try this, just to rule out an email client issue.
 
  1. Make sure both Outlook clients are updated to their latest release.
  2. Delete your EAS account from both Outlook clients.
  3. Log into your SmarterMail web interface account and go to Settings >> My Settings >> Synchronized Devices.  Delete all.
  4. (Personally, as a test, I would bounce the SmarterMail service here)
  5. Re-add your EAS account to both your Outlook 2013 and 2016 clients.  Depending on mail account size, give both clients enough time to sync.  
Let us know the results.
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Matthew,

We have 15+ million mailboxes with a significant percentage using EAS and Outlook. What your seeing is not normal. You should open a ticket and let us look at it.

Most of the time they aren't SmarterTools issues but we still help diagnose. Sometimes the issues are Viruses being detected by a Firewall which prevents packets from being transferred and stopping the EAS protocol from working. It would not impact Webmail because the message isn't being transferred but with EAS it is etc.

If there is an issue like above or even different issues... it is common to get different results in Outlook 2013 and 2016 because Outlook itself changed the order in which things are downloaded etc.

Were here to help.

Tim
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Also, are these accounts you just added? They might not be completed? Microsoft Outlook does a poor job telling you its still working. How many gigs is the mailbox?

Are you downloading the same mailbox on two different versions of Outlook at the same time? That will slow the import dramatically. Pulling gigs of data via EAS at the same time is very intensive and the mailbox will be locking for one client at a time. Its best to import those when you know the other is complete.

A good way to see if Outlook is done is to watch the CPU. Normally it will hover around 20 percent or so and you will see some disk access. For about 10 seconds you will see Outlook going to the server at about 20 to 30 mbs a second to get data... Then it processes it on the client for awhile... rinse and repeat.

Tim
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Was doing some QC work on our new SmarterMail 16.x this weekend and for the heck of it... removed my accounts in Outlook 2016 and re-added them on both SmarterMail 15.x and 16 BETA. All work as expected. Hope you open a ticket and look forward to being briefed by my support team on what they find.
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
David, your comment is not true. We have have nearly 10 million people using using Microsoft Outlook with no issues. Each and every issue is different. You should read some of my responses and comments in this thread. Thanks, Tim
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
All,
 
We were able to find another bug in Microsoft Outlook relating to messages not being moved to folders in certain circumstances when using EAS.  This could also result in different message counts not matching on Microsoft Outlook and the server as well as missing emails.  We were able to duplicate the behavior on Outlook.com when using Microsoft Outlook and EAS.  Our findings are being reported to Microsoft.  We will keep you updated.
 
 
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Paul Blank Replied
I am truly not trying to be nasty, but complaints about issues with SM and Outlook go back for years. As has been stated before, there should be a person or persons at ST dedicated only to Outlook (and perhaps other email client) compatibility issues, testing the heck out of it and making sure it just works. Reports of SM customers leaving SM for Exchange and Office 365 due to Outlook issues are posted on this forum regularly, and by myself as well.
 
No matter that Microsoft keeps changing the rules. That's a given. If ST wants to continue playing in the Enterprise arena, then they have be completely sure that compatibility with Outlook is as close to bulletproof as can be.
 
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
I'm not sure the purpose of the post.  We have multiple people assigned to clients such as Microsoft Outlook. That is clearly demonstrated by us finding another bug in Microsoft Outlook and working with Microsoft to help them resolve it.  This bug impacts all mail servers using EAS including Outlook.com.
 
We are also constantly releasing updates to our products to help people work around any issues that can be worked around with different clients etc.
 
Most issues that are reported to us aren't OUR issue but we still help our customers find solutions even if it includes working with companies such as Microsoft, Apple etc. 
  
There will be people that think the grass is greener and make a change, its hard to prevent that.  We do our best to build good products and make our support teams available same day and often within hours which isn't all that common.
 
When Microsoft just blew up the Office 365 service a couple months ago with missing emails in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook... we had a number of new sales and transitions to our product.
 
Look at the issues Microsoft has when they actually control the client and the server.  We have 15,000,000 users using SmarterMail and a significant percentage of those customers are using EAS and Microsoft Outlook etc..  How many complaints do we actually have on the community?  And realize the community is only used for complaints.
 
Normally, we can help most customers understand why issues are occurring but you always have the unique situations like the bug we found in Microsoft Outlook which required an enormous amount of time and the stars to aligned properly to find it.
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Matthew Leyda Replied
Maybe its because users are getting frustrated with your attitude. We ask questions and get no answer. We ask for improvements and get no answer. We report bugs and get to buy a support ticket and hope that you will be kind and refund it. Topics get large amount of votes, get marked "Under Consideration" then ignored for years.
 
Now it's "Live with the bugs" we are busy working on a new interface and you will love it. Don't tell us that, just fix the bugs.
Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP
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Stefano Vassena Replied
Agree with you
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Stefano Vassena Replied
Same problem Here. The issue seem to be the active sync protocol
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
First, its a community forum and not a support channel. But, employees still try to participate as well the CEO from time to time.

Second, if you need to contact the company and/or technical support, we respond same day and often within a couple hours.

Third, we updated the community on a bug in Microsoft Outlook that took us nearly couple months to find. We went above and beyond and contacted Microsoft to help them fix their issue so that it would benefit our customers.

The end result... a community response from a customer that "we get no answers and you have a bad attitude".

Fifth, we have a Public BETA of SmarterMail 16.x which goes WAY beyond interface changes and is the result of the many requests in the community and directly from customers.

We then encourage customers to participate in the BETA to discuss the work we have done and what could be better... ultimately allowing our customers to shape the product.

SmarterMail 16.x is the result of over a year of work and millions of dollars. Not often do companies re-invest and / or re-invent an existing product line or service at this scale.

Bottom line, I disagree with every comment you made and I wish the companies we purchased software from operated like we do.
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Matthew Leyda Replied
Tim,
There are requests that have been under consideration for up to 3 years now.
How about a up/down, Yes/ Hell NO answer on requests with lots of votes like these:



Two Factor Authentication for SmarterMail

Enforce HTTP to HTTPS Redirect in SmarterTools Products

Add Category/Group pane to Contacts

Domain Shared Calendars Published to Outlook

Allow reporting of Spam via IMAP

Modification to Auto-Clean Process

Implement Bruce's spam settings as default

Block File Extension List Serverwide

Customizable Webmail Client

Why not Validate Trusted Senders

Make Contacts -> Trusted Senders

Treat Smartermail Contacts as Trusted Senders

Global Postmaster and Abuse address

Content Filtering does not work for outbound messages

create or access a public file storage area

Force Password Change

Sync spam settings across multiple SM servers

contact groups in webmail only

Current IDS Block Table

Domain - Acceptable Use Policy - on First

Administrator with read-only permission

Is it possible to send AS an alias, and if so how

'Block Sender' is an outdated feature that permanently deletes messages

Disable auto-complete

Domain - Acceptable Use Policy - on First Login

Administrator with read-only permission

Is it possible to send AS an alias, and if so how

'Block Sender' is an outdated feature that permanently deletes messages
Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Your previous comments were about bugs.

Now you are talking about features.

And you list features that we haven't done but don't reference the 100's if not 1,000 features that we have done over 3 years.

Also, some of what you have listed above are included in SmarterMail 16.x BETA. I encourage you to participate in the BETA.

If you want to be upset, you can always find a reason. Were not going to get to everything you want.

Now that we are in BETA and pumping out releases each week... we will also be updating community threads that are related to some of these items.
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Matthew Leyda Replied
Tim,
You must have missed this in my post "We ask for improvements and get no answer."
Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP
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Paul Blank Replied
Not to knock down the cool stuff that SM does, but many of the feature requests mentioned above are common-sense needs here in the 21st Century, amongst them: outbound filtering, sync of anti-spam settings across servers, and most-importantly, having all appropriate EAS features that are provided by the Exchange + Outlook combination, specifically with regard to calendar sync and multiple calendar support.
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Matthew Leyda Replied
Tim,
I can do a list of bugs this weekend if you need it. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say you seem to be dictating instead of listening to your customers.
 
Off the top of my head, Outlook 2016 IMAP, EAS, Calendars. Webmail drops connection. The mystery of email missing or getting deleted.
Kendra Support http://www.kendra.com support@kendra.com 425-397-7911 Junk Email filtered ISP
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Tim Uzzanti Replied
Employee Post
Please see the response in the BETA forum.
Tim Uzzanti CEO SmarterTools Inc. (877) 357-6278 www.smartertools.com
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Michael Replied
Anyone having better EAS stability in Smarter Mail v16?
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viv burrows Replied
So far so good for us with SM16 and EAS, 15 was awful

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