Imported sent items not recognised as sent by me

[adrighem]

We migrated to zimbra recently. It went reasonably well. We do have an annoying problem though.

The problem is this: all imported messages are displayed as though I received them, even the messages sent by me to someone else. Now, I think this is some kind of itemflag as moving the message to the Sent Items folder doesn't change anything. The 'from'-address also changes nothing. Please note the following example (pietje is an alias of zimbraldap, so I'm sending to myself):

vincent@lt-vam:~$ telnet mailserver 25
Trying 10.254.5.112...
Connected to mailserver.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mailserver.domain ESMTP Postfix
EHLO pietje
250-mailserver.domain
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 153600000
250-VRFY
250-ETRN
250-STARTTLS
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-8BITMIME
250 DSN
MAIL FROM:<zimbraldap@domain.com>
250 2.1.0 Ok
RCPT TO:<pietje@domain.com>
250 2.1.5 Ok
DATA
354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
From: Zimbra MigrationLdap <zimbraldap@domain.com>
To: Frits Spits <pietje@domain.com>
Subject: Sent item test
Een leuke test voor sent items...klopt dit?
.
250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 304CE14819D

So, when I log into my webmail account, I see a From-column with zimbraldap in it. I expected to see pietje as the To-address.

Using this example, I think 'sent by me' is a message flag. Can anyone help me? I need to change this for about a hundred thousand emails.

[adrighem]

Example of a message which is displayed as sent by me:
mbox zimbraldap@domain.com> gm 10172
Id: 10172
Conversation-Id: 10174
Folder: /Sent
Subject: lalala
From: joop <joop@domain.com>
To: Zimbra MigratieLdap <zimbraldap@domain.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:24:55 +0100 (CET)
Flags: sentByMe
Size: 463 B


Notice the 'sentByMe'-flag?
Now, it looks as though I can't set this flag myself...

mbox zimbraldap@domain.com> gm 10241
Id: 10241
Conversation-Id: -10241
Folder: /Sent
Subject: Sent item test
From: Zimbra MigratieLdap <zimbra.ldap@domain.com>
To: Frits Spits <pietje@domain.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:39:43 +0100 (CET)
Flags: notificationSent, y
Size: 684 B

Een leuke test voor sent items...klopt dit?

mbox zimbraldap@domain.com> mif 10241 +sentByMe
mbox zimbraldap@domain.com> mif 10241 sentByMe
mbox zimbraldap@domain.com> mif 10241 s

They don't work.

I even tried this script:
[zimbra@mailbox ~]$ for x in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z ; do
echo $x
echo "mif 10241 $x" > /tmp/zmmailbox
echo "gm 10241" >> /tmp/zmmailbox
zmmailbox -z -m zimbraldap@domain.com -f /tmp/zmmailbox \
| grep -E "^Flags"
done

a
b
Flags: b
c
d
e
f
Flags: flagged
g
h
i
Flags: i
j
k
l
m
n
Flags: notificationSent
o
Flags: o
p
q
r
Flags: replied
s
t
u
v
w
Flags: forwarded
x
Flags: deleted
y
Flags: y
z

So, I can't find the 'sentByMe'-flag. I even tried upper case and numbers.

[adrighem]

I just downloaded the source and found the message definition. It appears sentByMe is the 's'-flag. Take a look at the source:

public class ZMessage implements ZItem, ToZJSONObject {

public enum Flag {
unread('u'),
flagged('f'),
highPriority('!'),
lowPriority('?'),
attachment('a'),
replied('r'),
sentByMe('s'),
forwarded('w'),
draft('d'),
deleted('x'),
notificationSent('n');

Down side though, it seems as though I can't change it. I tried to set the flag, but to no avail.

[adrighem]

Hi again,

I opened the mysql database and found that the flags column is responsible for this. It seems to be a bitmask, but I can't find any information on the meaning of the bits. It looks like:
1. Sentbyme
2. Attachment
....the rest is unknown

So 3 would be attachment AND sentbyme. I can change 3 to 1 and back again, but changing from 3 to 2 and back again does strange things...there's more to this...

If anyone can help me I would be very happy. Maybe one of the Zimbra developers?

[sktwolf]

Hello,
In one of my installation, i had this problem. I have solved it by exporting with the REST interface and reimporting it with the flag. It may be an ugly solution, but it saved me
Here are the commands lines i have made to done that :

su - zimbra
zmmailbox -z -m USER@Domain.com getRestURL /sent.zip > /tmp/USER.zip
zmmailbox -z -m USER@Domain.com emptyFolder /Sent
unzip /tmp/USER.zip -d /tmp/USER
zmmailbox -z -m USER@Domain.com addMessage -f sentByMe /Sent /tmp/USER/Sent
rm -rf /tmp/USER*

And thats it. You can put this commands lines into your migrations scripts until Zimbra get the command modifyItemFlags work with this flag.

[cmargena]

Any updates on this issue, I have more than 150k email account and I can not reimport all Sent folders. Is there any way to have this Flag field documented?

[adrighem]

Hi,

I solved it by editing the mysql database by hand (by script actually) and setting the bitmask. This requires a restart of the mailbox service, but does work.

So, in short, two workarounds
1. Edit the bitmask field inside the mysql database for the messages and add the 1 for every sent message. (restart mailboxd afterwards)
2. export and reimport sent items for all users by using the above commands. I didn't try this one, but it looks fairly straight forward.

I think I'd recommend the second one, even though I used the first one. It's pretty dodgy to edit the mysql database by hand.

[cmargena]

Many thanks, just a question arise: What you mean by add 1? In binary or in decimal base?

[adrighem]

Do a bitmask binary OR, so 2 becomes 3, 0 becomes 1, 1 stays 1 and 3 stays 3.

I mean, a bitmask binary OR, not an ADD...

[cmargena]

I do not know why in same cases worked and in others the content of the "To" field has disappeared, did it happend to anyone?.