After a server crash: User can login but inbox mails won't be shown

Problem reported by Stefan Mössner - 9/21/2024 at 4:13 PM

Submitted

Hi all,

I had a server crash and now I have issues with one user. First, the user wasn't able to login to webmail UI. So restarted the SmarterMail service. Then this user was able to login.

But then this user couldn't see all folders. I restored the folders.json file and now the user can login and sees the folder structure but he doesn't see the mails. Here's a screenshot of what this user is seeing:

On the server I see that the MailService.exe process is using 20 % to 35 % of CPU and this won't decrease.

The mailbox size of this user is 4,3 GB. Maybe it tooks a very long time to reindex all mails? The bad thing is that my hourly backup is overwritten and so I only have a backup that's now 24 hours old. Restoring this backup will lead to a loss of very important messages that were sent and received today. So I hope I don't have to go this way!

So what can I do to solve this issue?

Kind Regards

8 Replies

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Stefan Mössner Replied

9/21/2024 at 11:05 PM

The general error log shows this error every 20 minutes:

07:56:01.348 MailboxManager Exception in GetMailbox. Path: Inbox Root: D:/Mailserver/Domains/familiemoessner.homeip.net/Users/stefan/Mail. Exception: System.ObjectDisposedException: Cannot access a disposed object.
Object name: 'Mailbox'.
   at MailService.Mailboxes.Mailbox.Rebuild(UInt32 uidValidityValue)
   at MailService.Mailboxes.Mailbox.Deserialize(Boolean cameFromRebuild)
   at MailService.Mailboxes.Mailbox.MailboxConstructorFunction()
   at MailService.Mailboxes.MailboxManager.GetMailbox(String subFolderName, Dictionary`2 timings)

Stefan Mössner Replied

9/22/2024 at 12:24 AM

After deleting mailbox.cfg file in the inbox folder a new mailbox.cfg was created and the above error disapeared. But this doesn't solve the issue for this user.

Stefan Mössner Replied

9/22/2024 at 1:56 AM

I tried now with a full restore of the mail folder of this user but the issue is the same. I don't know if this issue is really related to the mail folder but it's related to this user. But in the logs there are no hints what's going wrong with this user. The error I posted above doesn't come up anymore.

Stefan Mössner Replied

9/22/2024 at 2:26 AM

I think I found the root cause: There were some empty files in the mail processing folder and one file that doesn't contain a message. This file contained log information and wasn't complete. After deleting these files the user can access his mails again.

Stefan Mössner Replied

9/22/2024 at 4:49 AM

There are now more things where I don't know what went wrong. To be sure that the installation of the SmarterMail server is fine, I uninstalled SmarterMail and reinstalled it again. But this doesn't help to fix these things:

Normally the messages will be saved to GRP files, right? I can't see that this is the case. I wonder, where these mails are now saved? They're on the right place if I stopp and restart the mail server.
I use POP retrieval of 2 external mail services. It is set to automatic retrieval but the retrieval won't happen. When I set it to manual and then start the manual retrieval the mails are retrieved.

Stefan Mössner Replied

9/22/2024 at 4:57 AM

Regarding 1.: The GRP files of the moved mails are now created.

Stefan Mössner Replied

9/22/2024 at 6:01 AM

Regarding 2.: Now the POP retrieval is working to. After deleting the POP retrieval for Outlook.com which doesn't work because of not using the modern authentication the POP retrieval of the other account works. For Outlook.com I switched back to IMAP which uses modern authentication and so this is working, too.

Stefan Mössner Replied

9/22/2024 at 6:04 AM

What is the difference between these two GRP files?

2024_9_21_u.grp
2024_9_21.grp

I see some more of these *_u.grp files since 12.09.2024.

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