Emails Vanishing from a Users Inbox
Posted by admin | Filed under Pick and Mix
This sounds strange doesn’t it, there one minute, gone the next.Initially I thought the server was at fault, perhaps a misguided spambox script was deleting the wrong directory or something like that.
Turns out it was much simpler than that, after looking at the maillog (which displays POP3 and IMAP Connections), it turns out the user was accessing the same account with 2 different protocols. As you’re probably aware, POP3 downloads messages from the Inbox, and IMAP work’s by downloading headers, and the body in a seperate action.
So, every time the user connected with pop3, the emails would be downloaded to the local machine. Then they would go back to their IMAP program and the emails had vanished.
I’m disappointed it took me so long to work out what was happening, but once again, the logfiles come to the rescue, hope this is insightful.
tail -60000 /var/log/maillog | grep "account@domain.com"
Tags: broken, centos 5.2, cpanel, email, Linux