Hello Matthias,

Which version of SmarterMail are you running. If it is a recent build you might want to check in this particular domain folder if settings.json exists and if the content looks like a valid json file.

It could be corrupted if the server was shutdown abruptly or if the service crashed while it was writing to the file.

If the file doesn't seem right, you should be able to recover the settings.json file from the Archive subfolder of the domain, which contains some backups of the domain settings file.

I hope this will help.

Kind regards

Hello Sebastien

Thank you for your help. I'm using the latest version of Smartermail.

Replacing the setting.json file from Archive does not fix the problem. I checked the other json-files and the accounts.json file was corrupted. I restored the file from the Archive and now the problem are fixed.

Kind regards

Matthias Maass

Oh okay, cool you were able to recover the domain. Thanks you for letting me know.

Good morning everyone! Out of curiosity, how do you proceed with upgrades? Do you stop the SmarterMail IIS site, application pool, or system service before uninstalling? Do you uninstall or simply install the new version? One thing I like to do on busier environments is to stop all of these in series so the connected clients have time to terminate connectivity: 

1. Stop the SmarterMail IIS site and then it's application pool.

2. Stop the SmarterMail system service and wait ~30 seconds for the service to drop out of memory. 

3. Uninstall, then install the new version.

4. While the installer is copying new files; start the SmarterMail application pool and IIS site. 

We stop IIS, then manually go in and shutdown the application pools. We have two - one runs our iOS/macOS .mobileconfig generator and the other runs SmarterMail.  Both are set to be "always on" instead of "demand-start" - so shutting down IIS doesn't stop the Application Pools from staying in memory.

Then we shutdown the SmarterMail MailService.

We wait until everything is cleared from "active tasks" plus about 30 seconds - then we run the installer.

The Installer usually starts SmarterMail service on it's own.  After installer clears from memory, we restart IIS and turn the application pools back on.

The whole process takes less than 3 minutes usually. We currently service about 400 mailboxes across 90 domains on that server (for reference).

We've not had an upgrade issue - only the random bug that appears from whatever SM version we are on that almost always is triaged in the next update.