Hello everyone. I wanted to share with everyone an the experience I had last night when upgrading my SM12x to 14x and stress how truly important it is to have a backup of your Smartermail Domains folder. I'm running a Windows 2008 R2 64-bit server. I have done literally hundreds of both major and minor upgrades to SM over the years and never had any issues. Well, last night showed me exactly what could go wrong. Even though I have done so many upgrades, I always follow the Smartermail Major Upgrade instructions to the letter just in case there is some extra step in any new versions that are released. Well, I did my upgrade, re-activated my key and started testing flow of emails. All emails were getting stuck in the Spool for some reason. I restarted the SM service several times with no luck. I then rebooted the server and I was forced to re-activate my key once more. That fixed the mailflow issue, but I woke up this morning to my phone ringing off the hook with complaints of blank passwords that were unable to be reset. The worst part was a lot of the domain admin passwords were blanked out as well which caused me to have to manually create new admin accounts just so I could get in and see the integrity of the users accounts. Well, a lot of the users also had blank passwords and their user settings such as mailbox size were defaulted back to 100mb. I tried to reset the passwords for these accounts, but when I clicked Save, the passwords were still blank. In other words, I was unable to set or reset any passwords for these accounts. I logged into my actual server and started looking through my user's folders. I noticed that the UserConfig.xml for the corrupted accounts showed they were 7-9kb in size. However, when I opened the UserConfig.xml files with a text editor, they were completely blank. That explained the entire issue, so I took my backup UserConfig.xml files for all users and restored them back into the user's folders. That resolved my issue.

 

I just wanted to let everyone know in case they happen to have the same issue. If you would like to read a little more about this issue, I have wrote a KB article about it which you can read here: http://know.mailsbestfriend.com/how_to_fix_blank_password_and_user_defaults_issue_after_a_smartermail_upgrade--1388797980.shtml. The article lists some possible reasons why this happened. Also, if you need help resolving the issue, please feel free to contact us and we can assist. Have a great day everyone!