Tracking a received message
My question is how to track a received message. That is, although I can verify that a message has been received (the D record in mail-log), and put into related account (the E record in mail-log), the user complains that he never got the message (Outlook 2003 at the client side using POP3 protocol). So, is there anything else that I can look for tracking down the message any further than the before mentioned D and E lines in the mail log. Another thing, those logs does not give any clue about the received message like subject line or anything like that. So, is there a way of getting more specific to the received messages from out of the mail server logs?
Thanks,
Rami
[694 byte] By [
ramia] at [2007-11-26 15:18:01]
# 1
Hi,
> My question is how to track a received message. That
> is, although I can verify that a message has been
> received (the D record in mail-log), and put into
> related account (the E record in mail-log), the user
> complains that he never got the message (Outlook 2003
> at the client side using POP3 protocol). So, is there
> anything else that I can look for tracking down the
> message any further than the before mentioned D and E
> lines in the mail log.
Yes. Do you have backups ? If so, restore the messages from backup into the account and see if the message with the appropriate time-stamp exists or not. I have had to deal with the whole 'missing email' scenario a number of times and I have never had a case where messaging server itself was at fault. Most of the time it was client problems (e.g. badly configured mail filters, they had deleted the email(s) and didn't want to admit it until pushed, duplicate POP clients) or sometimes server issues (file-system corruption).
> Another thing, those logs does
> not give any clue about the received message like
> subject line or anything like that. So, is there a
> way of getting more specific to the received messages
> from out of the mail server logs?
Yes. Refer to the LOG_HEADER option.dat parameter in the messaging server reference guide.
Even if you had the subject line, what would this prove? You still can't
*prove* that the email really WAS in the account unless you can see the physical .msg file on disk. This will just tell you that the message was delivered, which you should be able to tell from the sender/recipient pair already.
Regards,
Shane.
