Issue with occasional email not displaying

Hi

I have an issue with imap accounts accessed by iphone and outlook where the mail is occasionally displayed for a short time in outlook then not displayed. setup: imap account on 2x outlook 2007 machines and one iphone.

A specific instance as described today: The email was first seen in outlook at one location yesterday at about 12.30pm. A short time later seen on iphone and disappeared from both outlook accounts. Was then forwarded from the iphone back to the same email/info account and the forwarded email is/remains visible on all three machines. Checked the server and the the original mail file is still in the cur folder. The client continues to still see the original email on their iphone (but not in either outlook), The file on server had ,Sa append and I tried rename back to ,S - but no no effect.

For this account we have had an ongoing issue for a few months where the email will remain visible on the iphone but disappears in outlook. The email file always remains in the cur directory. The user is close to ludite territory and we dont believe she or anyone else is playing games. Is it possible for one outlook user to 'do something' which will prevent display in outlook. This scenario isn't a deleted message with strikethrough remaining etc, simply the message stops displaying in outlook but remains visible on the iphone. Not all messages, maybe 5% of the incoming messages suffer the same fate and disappear in outlook.

I have googled all sorts of queries and can find a few others with disappearing email but the numbers are low - ie unusual. For me it keeps pointing to the user but the testing and personal interaction/relationship we have with this particular client says the user isn't the problem.

We are at a bit of a loss. We can see it happening, but can't explain. Certainly not saying an issue with virtualmin - that is, don't shoot the messenger environment:-} Just have you seen the issue elsewhere and if so is there a fix.

Any ideas????

Regards Kevin

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Comments

Hi Kevin -- that all sounds quite strange! But unfortunately, I hadn't heard of that before.

It at first almost sounded like one client might be configured to use POP, rather than IMAP, since POP would download the message and remove it from the other clients -- but you said you still see the message on the server.

If you aren't seeing any other users on your server with that problem, I suppose it's possible it's an Outlook bug. To test that, you could always try having them configure a different client, perhaps Thunderbird, or a newer version of Outlook, to see if the same thing happens.

Or you could try logging into a Webmail client, to see if the message shows up there.

If those messages continue to show up in all clients but Outlook, that would make me think you're seeing some sort of Outlook issue.

I'd suggest making sure both the individual user, and the Virtual Server as a whole, are no where near their quota.

And if your server is a VPS using OpenVZ, you may want to look at /proc/user_beancounters to see if there's anything listed in the "failcnt" field, which may imply a resource problem. We've seen that cause really weird problems.