ZCS Administrator Guide 8.0

Network Edition

Fixing Corrupted Mailbox Index

Mail messages and attachments are automatically indexed before messages are deposited in a mailbox. Each mailbox has an index file associated with it. This index file is required to retrieve search results from the mailbox.

If a mailbox's index file becomes corrupt or is accidentally deleted, you can re-index the messages in the mailbox from the administration console.

Text searches on an account might or might not fail with errors when the index is corrupt. You cannot count on a user reporting a failed text search to identify that the index is corrupt. You must monitor the index log for messages about corrupt indexes. If the server detects a corrupt index, a message is logged to the Zimbra mailbox.log at the WARN logging level. The message starts with Possibly corrupt index. When this message is displayed, the administrator must correct the problem. In many cases correcting the problem might mean reindexing the mailbox.

Reindexing a mailbox's content can take some time, depending on the number of messages in the mailbox. Users can still access their mailbox while reindexing is running, but because searches cannot return results for messages that are not indexed, searches may not find all results.

Check if an Index is Corrupt

Run a sanity check on a specific mailbox index using the command zmprov verifyIndex.

To check if an index is corrupt, run

zmprov verifyIndex <user@example.com>

If problems are detected, a failure status is returned and a repair can be performed on the index.

Repair and Reindex a Corrupt Index

To repair and reindex an index, run

zmprov reIndexMailbox <user@example.com> start

This returns a status of "started".