Email Craziness!

[jandafields]

My email accounts are working good, but there are some odd things happening "behind the scenes".

 

In my /mail folder, I have the following:

 

/user1

/user2

/user3

/user4

/mail.****

/domain.com

inbox

 

/user1 contains a 2MB inbox file

 

---

 

Inside /domain.com is the following:

 

/user1

/user2

/user3

/user4

 

/user1 contains inbox (2MB) and inbox.pop (2MB)

 

 

The problem is that user1 has 2MB of emails, but is using 6MB of disk space!

Yes, I can go in and manually delete the extra stuff, but it will just come back. User1 will only have 2MB of emails, but because they are being saved in 3 places, they run out of quota fast - and for no apparant reason to them. This does not necessarily apply to user1 only. It happens to any user.

 

 

Another problem is that a user actually has 7MB of deleted messages in their deleted folder, but only has a quota of 3MB, and CPanel only shows 1MB used, it is not counting the deleted file, only the inbox!

 

Another thing is that in the root /mail folder, there is a file called inbox. That file contains lots of returned error emails (destination doesn't exist, destination full, etc.) Both sent out from cpanel and received from cpanel. Why are these getting collected here? I am the default address. Those should be coming to me, not just filling up disk space.

[TCH-Rick]

We would need access to your account to be sure there is no problem and so that would need to be sumitted to the Help Desk by clicking on the link at the top of this page.

 

There are a couple of things to note. The user1 inbox in their folder and the user1 inbox in the domain.com/user1 folder are actually links to the same information so they do not use double the space. There may be some mail in the spam folder if Spam Assassin is enabled that could account for the space.

 

The inbox in the root mail folder is the inbox for your domain email. System messages will go there.

[jandafields]

There is a file called index that is 2 MB.

 

When I set Outlook to leave messages on server, it creates a new file called index.pop that is a duplicate of index.

 

If I delete index.pop, my messages are still all on the server, but the file comes back as soon as Outlook does its stuff. This doubles the space used.

 

How do I have the domain email sent to the default address?

[MikeJ]

mail/user1/inbox and mail/domain.com/user1/inbox are the same file (even though they look like 2) so it's only taking up the space of one of them. inbox.pop is used for pop3 operations and I'm not certain exactly what cases this file gets created/used.

 

As far as default email address, make sure you set the default email address for ALL domains and subdomains you have parked/created on that account to what you want.

[TCH-Bruce]

Each time you access your email with a POP3 client the a .pop file (index.pop) gets created. After the messages are downloaded the index.pop file should go away. It's like a lock file.

Edited May 6, 2004 by TCH-Bruce

[jandafields]

But, the index.pop file does NOT go away IF I have Outlook set to leave messages on the server. I can manually delete the file, and it does not affect any of my messages in webmail because I still have the inbox file, but it comes right back when Outlook connects again (and stays).

 

By the way, thank you Rick and MikeJ for clarifying about the mail/user1/inbox and mail/domain.com/user1/inbox being the same file.

 

So, basically my only problem now is how to get the inbox.pop file deleted automatically when Outlook is set to leave messages on the server. Could this be an Outlook problem? A CPanel problem? The inbox.pop file counts against the user's email quota.

[TCH-Bruce]

You are correct, the index.pop files stays. I just checked mine. I don't leave mail on the server though so it is a size of 0.

[jandafields]

When I leave mail on the server, it SHOULD empty or delete index.pop, since the messages stay in index.

 

Is there a fix to this? A workaround?

 

This is a bad problem since it counts agains user quota, they are over quota when they see only half that amount in their web email.

 

Not using Outlook's "leave messages on server" is not an option I want to use.

[MikeJ]

I'm looking into it. The only thing I've found so far is this seems to be a "problem" unique to Outlook (and possibly Outlook Express) when leave mail on server is enabled, at least as far as what I've seen with mention of cases where inbox.pop does not empty. If I turn up more details, I'll be sure to update here.

[jandafields]

I've been reading on the official CPanel forums.

 

2 (bad) things that I noticed:

 

Lots of people are having problems with inbox.pop eating up space.

 

Mail quotas only apply to the inbox file, not mail in any other folders the users may have created.

[ThumpAZ]

moving for better forum organization.

[dlevens]

Mail quotas only apply to the inbox file, not mail in any other folders the users may have created.

Wow, is this true? That users can bypass their quota by moving mail out of their inbox to another folder they create on the server? For instance I use squirrelmail for all my users and they have many folders they use for organization. If they move a ton of their email to a folder outside of inbox then those emails are not counted anymore against quota?

 

Dennis

[jandafields]

That post was written a few cpanel versions ago. It was a known bug and is *possibly* fixed now.