[SOLVED] disappearing messages

[cdenley]

On the owner's account, all the messages in his inbox appear to have disappeared. Normally, I would suspect someone deleted the messages, but the folder's messageCount suggests otherwise.

EDIT: I'm beginning to suspect that no messages are missing, but that the message count is inaccurate. Looking at the mailbox at different points in the last few days, the messageCount is always 77 above the actual number of messages.

zimbra@zimbra:~$ zmmailbox -z -m gb gf Inbox
{
     "children": [],
     "color": "defaultColor",
     "flags": "u",
     "grants": [],
     "id": "2",
     "messageCount": 87,
     "name": "Inbox",
     "parentId": "1",
     "path": "/Inbox",
     "unreadCount": 9,
     "view": "message"
}
zimbra@zimbra:~$ zmmailbox -z -m gb search in:Inbox
num: 10, more: false

Is it possible for a user to delete messages without changing the folder's message count? Is there a log I can check to determine exactly what happened to the messages. They are not in Trash, or any other folder. I know I can recover the messages, but I need to know how this happened and how to prevent it in the future.

[soxfan]

Could the user have logged in to their Zimbra account using a POP3 email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)? This is the first thing I think of when someone says "disappearing messages".

You can look for pop connections in the /opt/zimbra/log/mailbox.log file.

[cdenley]

Originally Posted by soxfan

Could the user have logged in to their Zimbra account using a POP3 email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)? This is the first thing I think of when someone says "disappearing messages".

The only client he is using besides the web interface should be Outlook with the Zimbra Connector. Even if he were using IMAP or POP3, shouldn't that update the message count of the folder? I did copy messages INTO that account using IMAP a couple weeks ago, but the problem seems to have existed before that.

[soxfan]

I'm not sure if the folder count would get updated after a POP3 connection. I just know that based on past posts "lost messages = pop3 connection" a good portion of the time. The POP3 connection would pull the messages locally to the person's PC, without leaving any trace on the server of these messages.

[cdenley]

How can I fix the message count for the folder?

[soxfan]

Try reindexing the user's mailbox. You can do this from the Admin console. Just find the account, select Edit, and then Reindex Mailbox will be one of the options in the Toolbar. Not sure if this will fix the problem, but it is worth a shot.

[cdenley]

I actually already fixed the problem. I think it started when I transferred messages from the old server to zimbra via IMAP. Some messages were marked as deleted. Zimbra was ignoring those messages, but apparently still counting them for the folder's message count. After undeleting everything via IMAP, the message count is correct. I think if messages are created via IMAP being marked as deleted, then you will encounter this problem. I haven't reproduced it yet, though. I had transferred messages using imapcopy.

[praveen25]

plz check under preferences if the users mails to delete in 30 days / 45 days for inbox (read / unread) and see if the messages got purged themselves

[cdenley]

Bug 20620 – Item count should account for \Deleted IMAP messages

I had configured Outlook to connect to the account via IMAP to recover messages the user suspected were missing. Outlook was configured to use low-level spam filtering. Message detected as obvious spam were marked as deleted by outlook and copied to Junk. These "deleted" messages were being counted for the folder's message count, but were not visible through zimbra's web interface or the zmmailbox command.