Invisible messages

[deepblue]

Hi all,

One of our Zimbra users complained about Zimbra is telling him, that he is "over quota" although there are only some messages in one of his folders.

When I log into the users account, I can indeed see only ~10 msg. in the spamfolder, but the quota is exceeded.

zmmailbox -z -m <account> gaf

tells me, that the user has about 1200 msg with ~50MB in various folders. I can not see the messages... Not through the Webinterface and not through IMAP.
I made a full backup for the account, which resulted in all 1200 msgs being dumped... So the messages are there - but not to be seen by the user.

There is one "suspicious" filter for the account. The user tried to automatically move some messages to the spamfolder. But he has accidently setup the filter in a way, which will move any incoming message to the spamfolder.... I dont know, if this is related to those invisible messages.

What is going on there? How can I track the problem?
Even if I try to restore the account from backup (to a new account), the problem persists....

Regards
Thomas

[dkarp]

Try having the user go into their IMAP client and "compact" or "expunge" their folders.

For some reason, the creators of IMAP decided to use an "almost deleted" state that requires a second client step to actually hard-delete messages. Until this second step happens, the messages still count against the user's quota. The Zimbra web client hides these messages, as it expects the user's IMAP client to actually do the "expunge" step when appropriate. If the client doesn't, odd quota behavior such as the one you're seeing can occur.