EMAIL: User NOT FOUND after mailbox removed but forwarding in place
Hi,
We have a customer who had a mailbox that was also set up as a forward. So, someone sends an email it was delivered to the Inbox and then a copy sent to the mail forwarding address. The mailbox storage ended up getting full and senders received bounce backs, but the emails were still forwarded to the forwarding address. Seems reasonable. The customer cleaned out the mailbox last night but users were still getting bounce backs that the mailbox was full up until about an hour ago. But the mailbox was mostly empty. That is one issue but the bigger issue we are curious about is.... The customer decided they didn't need the mailbox and wanted to just keep mail forwarding in place. So we deleted the mailbox. Now when someone send an email, the email gets forward to the forwarding address but senders are receiving bounce backs that the mailbox "user" doesn't exist. How do we fix that? I did delete and re-create the mail forwarding for that address but that didn't help. The server is still reporting that the mailbox doesn't exist.
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Hey there! I guess I don't fully understand the situation? If the mailbox was deleted, and the mail is hosted locally on the machine, that error sounds correct to me. Is the email actually supposed to be delivered to a different location now that the mailbox is removed?
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test@test.com (example). This was set up as a mailbox, but under Forwarding it was set up to forward emails to a different email address. The mailbox was deleted but the forwarding is still in place. The forwarding works but senders are still receiving an error that the user doesn't exist.
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Ooooh I see now - you're forwarding FROM that mailbox and not TO that mailbox. Makes sense.
What happens if you run the following:
grep -Ri test@test.com /etc/vfilters/ /etc/valiases/
That would show you anything else that may exist for the account that could be causing forwarding to the wrong place.
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It's not forwarding to the wrong place.
test@test.com was a mailbox.
Under Email/Forwarding test@test.com was also set up to forward emails to bob@bob.com
test@test.com mailbox was removed. Forwarding to bob@bob.com still works.
But when senders send a message to test@test.com they are receiving a bounce back that the user test@test.com doesn't exist although it's set up to forward emails to bob@bob.com which still works.
Emails are still forwarded even though senders are receiving a bounce back that the old mailbox user doesn't exist.
Sounds like something is still cached after the mailbox was deleted and hasn't purged.
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Right, maybe that wasn't the best wording. Did you find anything in those areas that could give a clue? If not, we'd likely need to see a ticket.
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OR..does the Exim log itself at /var/log/exim_mainlog give any more detail on the failure?
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Is there a way to get to the Exim log via cPanel GUI? I'm not experienced with Linux command line stuff. Sorry.
The mail delivery report says, "LMTP error after RCPT TO:<test@test.com>: 550 5.1.1 <test@test.com> User doesn't exist: test@test.com". And then there's a copy of the same message received that was accepted for the forwarding event.
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Thank you quietFinn, sounds like this is exactly what is going on here.
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Oh nice! I wasn't aware of that one!
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Does anyone understand what the workaround in the article does exactly? It says in step 2 "Move the forwarded email account's mail directory". Where does it move the account too? Seems like it should be deleting the account if it wasn't properly deleted the first time around.
I also wonder how the account didn't get deleted properly... Under Email Accounts I selected the account and then clicked the Delete button. Doesn't get any more straight forward than that.
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In this case, it just means to rename it. In Linux the 'mv' command (for move) can be used to rename a file too.
So in the example in the article
mv -v /home/$cpaneluser/mail/domain.tld/$username{,.$(date +%s)}Just means rename the mailbox to include a date.
Hope that helps.
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Yes that is helpful thank you.
So, I was able to FTP into the users account in cPanel. I see the mail/cpanel account/ folder and inside that folder I see the folder for the mailbox that should have been deleted. Can I just delete that or rename it? Would that have the same effect as that script?
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So I created a test mailbox called "test". The folder "test" showed up under /mail/customerdomain.com folder. I deleted the mailbox from cPanel. the "test" folder was removed. So, it would seem that when I deleted that other mailbox the associated folder under /mail/customerdomain.com should have been deleted. So I would think it would be safe to remove that folder which should hopefully resolve our issue.
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I deleted the folder and that fixed the issue.
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I used WINSCP to connect and delete the folder. I noticed in WINSCP that the mailbox folder which I had deleted had Rights set to "rwx" whereas all the other mailbox folders in-use had Rights set to "rwxr-x--x". Not sure if that had something to do with why the folder wasn't fully deleted via cPanel? I haven't looked up what all those rights depict but...just something I noticed....
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Can you share which specific mailbox folder that was?
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The mailbox folder that wasn't removed when I deleted the Email account from cPanel. In my original notes above I referenced it as "test@test.com".
Anyway, to sum it up.....
I had an email account in cPanel/Email Accounts which I deleted using the Delete feature. That same email address was also set up as a Forward which remained in use. After the mailbox was deleted any time someone sent an email to that address (which forwards), senders received a bounce back saying that the user didn’t exist. The forwarding email was delivered so that worked.
I noticed when I FTP into the customer's cPanel account that under /mail/customerdomain.com/ I noticed the folder for the mailbox I deleted in cPanel. So, as a test I created a new mailbox (I called it test, sorry for any confusion) and I noticed a folder under /mail/customerdomain.com/test that showed up. I used the Delete option in cPanel/Email Accounts to delete the mailbox “test” and the folder was removed. I took that as a sign that the folder for the original mailbox I deleted should have also been removed.
I did wonder if that folder remained because the email address was also set up as a Forward but I noticed other addresses that were set up as a Forward did not have a folder in the /mail/customerdomain.com/ directory. So, I figured it was safe to remove the folder which I did and that fixed the problem. No more bounce backs.
The folder that I manually deleted above in /mail/customerdomain.com/ using WinSCP showed Rights set to "rwx" whereas all the other folders had Rights set to "rwxr-x--x". So, I didn’t know if that had anything to do with why cPanel didn’t remove that folder when I deleted the mailbox or not. Or if it was just some fluke that it wasn’t removed.
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