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maildir new folder deleting

sparek-3
Anybody else noticing this? I'm seeing a lot of mail being backlogged in the queue across multiple servers. When I go to investigate, some of these messages are not being delivered: [plain]email@example.tld R=virtual_user T=dovecot_virtual_delivery_no_batch defer (-46): LMTP error after end of data: 451 4.2.0 Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information.[/plain] The issue appears to be that the new folder (part of maildir - new, cur, tmp) is missing for that particular email account. Recreating that folder (and setting proper ownership) fixes the issue. A few of these have happened in the past, and I just write it off as users unknowingly deleting the new folder. But this seems to be increasing now to the point that I'm wondering if it's something in Dovecot or cPanel that is causing these folders to be deleted. I don't have a lot of investigative material to go on. But just wondering if anyone else is noticing this.

Comments

4 comments

Date Votes
  • GOT
    Not seeing this on any of the servers we manage.
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  • sparek-3
    Thanks! It's entirely possible that this is being caused by something specific I have set up on our servers. Although, I'm just not seeing any rhyme or reason that is leading to this. But still, I appreciate the feedback. Information that doesn't confirm a problem is still useful information.
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  • cPanelMichael
    Hello @sparek-3, This was brought up in the past as part of internal case CPANEL-8388. The decision was made to not implement a change since there was nothing to indicate the "new" directory was removed as part of a function of cPanel & WHM. The advice in the case was to seek out and disable whatever was manually removing the "new" directory. I did take some time to see if I could reproduce the automatic removal of the "new" directory, but I was unsuccessful. Are there any specific third-party applications installed on your system that relate to the mail server? Or, do you think this was the case of a user manually removing the directory? Thank you.
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  • sparek-3
    Not really. Nothing that would be deleting this folder, at least that I can think of. But I won't go so far to say that it's not something specific I have set up. I put a lot of customizations into our servers, so it's entirely possibly that I've overlooked something. Still - I would think it would be more problematic if it were something due to our customizations - we'd see a lot more incidents of this. As it stands now, I'm not seeing this happening a whole lot. Maybe once a week or once every 2 weeks. So it's not enough to really raise a lot of red flags, but it just seems to keep happening. Perhaps this is because I'm only noticing it when the mail queue gets higher than normal on our servers. And it's entirely possible that it's the end-user deleting the new folder, in a method to try and prevent new mail deliveries. I really don't know. Just doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Like I said, it doesn't happen often, but seems to have been going on for at least the past 6 months or so. If it were happening to the same account over and over again, I'd be more likely to agree that this is the case. But thus far, I haven't been able to make any connection to the various accounts this has happened to. I thought someone else might've noticed the same issue and that might kind of lead credence to it being a cPanel, Dovecot, or Exim issue. But that doesn't appear to be the case. No worries on a lack of solution though. I'll keep monitoring and seeing if I can connect the dots.
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