old emails with subject Message undeliverable

[associates]

Hi,

I wonder if I can get some help from you. I'm running hMailServer 5.3-B1617 on XP Pro. Yesterday, one of my colleagues was trying to retrieve some of the old emails that arrived last year. She normally stores her emails based on the work she's been involved in, and she's pretty sure that she used to be able to open this email before but yesterday what she could find was the email with the subject "Message undeliverable". In the content of the email, it says as follows

The mail server could not deliver the message to you since the file
C:\Program
Files\hMailServer\Data\mycompany\esther\A8\{A87BB846-CDFB-4DD5-B59F-
F4CFC5BD9C91}.eml does not exist on the server.

The file may have been deleted by anti virus software running on the server.

hMailServer

I am concerned now as whether or not we have lost her emails. She said she got quite a few of those emails.

My question is whether or not there is a way of getting those emails back.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[Bill48105]

Hey associates,
Well just like the error says, the file is missing. Since hmailserver is not psychic (nor are we lol) it can only report it & we can only guess what happened. Perhaps real-time antivirus grabbed it. Maybe you have/had drive corruption or pending failure. Maybe someone or some script deleted the eml files during 'cleanup'. Maybe during an upgrade of hmailserver awhile back the database became out of sync with the Data folder. Perhaps even concurrent access of the same box or database corruption. Suppose the list could go on & on. Of course there could be a bug in hmailserver but we'd need to know a LOT more info like seeing logs etc but keep in mind with just about any of those examples I gave odds are the logs won't show what happened to the file. It simply was not there when the database said it should be and hmailserver tells you so.
Bill

[mattg]

Most common reason files go missing is AV scanning them and quarantining them.
Have you excluded the hMailserver Data directory from AV scanning?

[associates]

Thanks for your reply.

I am not quite sure if it is the AV that removed the files. In General tab under Settings > Anti-virus, I had it set to Delete e-mail "When a virus is found". I think this may be what caused it to remove the files. I did not have ClamWin activated nor is External virus scanner activated. So I can not see if it is the AV that does it.

But since then, I now have selected "Delete attachments" when a virus is found instead, and with no ClamWin and no External virus scanner.

To answer your question regarding "Have you excluded the hMailserver Data directory from AV scanning?" is that I never set to use ClamWin or External virus scanner so I do not think if the AV's been scanning all this time.

I suppose my tasks now are to find out why it happen and how to prevent it from happening again.

Thank you

[mattg]

Do you have any AV on the server?

I don't just mean linked to hMailserver, I mean just present on the server.

Typically this file loss is caused by a AV system scanning the hMailserver directory, finding a suspicious file and 'quarantining' the file. That's why you need to exclude AV software from scanning your data directory...

[associates]

Yes, I have the BitDefender AV on the machine. I suspect it must have caught and deleted them. What a pain. All right, I will make sure that the data directory will be excluded from scanning in the future.

Thank you for your assistance

[^DooM^]

http://www.hmailserver.com/documentatio ... quirements

Virus scanners

For hMailServer to work properly, automatic virus scanning of the hMailServer Data directory must be disabled. You should configure your virus scanner to exclude the hMailServer Data directory from scanning. If you do this, it is recommended that you configure hMailServer to launch your virus scanner whenever a new e-mail is received.

[associates]

Thanks a lot ^Doom^ for the info