[SOLVED]Emails that were fectched are not showing up in OTRS

[jfreeman2nc]

I have noticed in the past day that several emails that were fetched from our Exchange server are not showing up in the OTRS system. I have not changed any priority names and have looked in the OTRS\Var\Spool folder and am not seeing any emails stuck in there. It seems to happen randomly as I have watched several emails actually being pulled from Exchange but then can never find the related ticket in OTRS. If anyone could offer any suggestions on what else could be causing this issue, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[renee]

Did you have a look at the logfile?

[crythias]

Do you have any PostMasterFilters enabled that X-OTRS-Ignore for some reason?
Or do they get put into a Queue you don't have? Are there any log messages (System Log) that indicate tickets were handled in such a way?

[jfreeman2nc]

I have checked the log and am not seeing any errors regarding email fetching. I have a good number of postmaster filters but none of them are set to ignore, I am going to go back and double check each filter to see if something was set by accident. The just happens randomly, I saw it happen to like 5 emails out of 300 yesterday. I do have CRON set to fetch emails every minute, should I try to decrease it to say 5 minutes? Would fetching too frequently cause a disruption?

[crythias]

Would fetching too frequently cause a disruption?

It's possible (?) that simultaneous fetching of large quantities of tickets could offset the counter that indicates which ticket will be deleted after retrieval.

[jfreeman2nc]

I know that you have had a good bit of experience with different OTRS setups, would setting it to fetch every 5 minutes be reasonable. Or is the default 10 minute fetch time recommended?

[crythias]

The biggest problem is volume plus attachments. If you're dealing with high volume with attachments, it will affect you.
I'm more of a fan of using procmail to handle tickets instantly, but since you're in a Windows environment, establishing procmail via cygwin may not exactly be possible or suggested.

Obviously, the trade offs with mail retrieval are delay in reaction to incoming tickets versus the volume of tickets. Time to respond is a factor that is yours to consider.

5 minutes might be adequate, and maybe even 3 minutes. On the other hand, I don't know how many tickets queue up in that time for you, either.

[jfreeman2nc]

In a 5 minute timeframe I would expect an average of 10 to 15 emails to queue up. This all makes me wish that I could have gone with a Linux box, but management is afraid that if I left no one would be able to support the system.

[crythias]

that sounds like 3 minutes might be sufficient. Attachments?

[jfreeman2nc]

Not all have attachments, but a good number do. I am storing all of the attachments as articles outside of the database.

[msraje]

Hi

I am trying to setup OTRS in Windows Environment in our organization. We have an exchange server and we have created a common email id. When we tried to setup the postmaster account, we found that it only supports POP3/S and IMAP/S. Our company policy does not allow to have POP/IMAP as the server type and it does supports SMTP. I tried to run through the otrs.postmaster.pl also, but it did not provide any message and the screen just shows that it is running. Where to configure our email id then?

Could any one help me, how to setup the OTRS, where it can automatically create the email requests raised through our common email id?

Appreciate any help on this regard !

Thanks
Raji

[crythias]

SMTP is for sending mail.

There is no security reason not to be able to use IMAPS.

Best bet: Forward to gmail or another account.

[jfreeman2nc]

I have set the fetch times to 5 minutes and also performed an upgrade to 3.0.10 this weekend. I am going to see if these changes possibly resolve the issues.

[MichaelR]

There are some problems like not updating the default state in the postmaster section of sysconfig when you change the system default states. That will make the emails disappear from the mailbox, but be lost in OTRS

Even down to 2-3 minutes is fine. On average I would say 5-10 seconds processing per email.

[msraje]

Hi

Thanks for the reply. The only protocol supported by my company to access the exchage server is mapi-135.
Could anyone let me know, if there any work around involved in accessing through mapi-135?

Thanks in advance
Raji

[jojo]

MAPI is not supported and currently I never heard from a workaround

[crythias]

The only other workaround would be to use your outlook client to fetch and forward.

There are at least three ways I've read that might be useable (I haven't tested any of them, but they will need programming to make the interface work with PostMaster, and may require an installed Outlook client.)
http://search.cpan.org/~barbie/Mail-Out ... Outlook.pm
http://search.cpan.org/~bmames/Rinchi-O ... Outlook.pm
http://search.cpan.org/~jdb/Win32-OLE-0 ... n32/OLE.pm

[jfreeman2nc]

I upgraded to 3.0.10 this weekend and changed the fetch time to 5 minutes. I was looked in the error log this morning and saw the following error:

Code: Select all

[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 2 is empty!

Code: Select all

[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 3 is empty!

This is the first time I have seen this error in the log, does anyone have any idea what could be the cause?

Thanks

[jfreeman2nc]

Also, it seems after the update to 3.0.10 and increasing the fetch time to every 5 minutes. Some emails are being fetched, but are not being brought into OTRS. I am not sure if the log error posted above has anything to do with this or not, I just know it is starting to make me want to pull my hair out.

[MichaelR]

I'm still on OTRS 3.0.9 so I cannot confirm. But definitely check the OTRS & Apache logs to see if anything has failed. That failing, try reproduce the issue by sending multiple emails.

[jfreeman2nc]

[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 6 is empty!
[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 7 is empty!
[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 8 is empty!

I am still randomly getting this error message. It seems when I get this error message the email is fetched but never comes over into the OTRS system. I was also having the same issue when I was on 3.0.8, but did not receive the above error messages in the log.

I have checked the Apache log and am not seeing any errors, so I am still unsure of what is causing this issue.

[crythias]

[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 6 is empty!
[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 7 is empty!
[Error][Kernel::System::MailAccount::POP3::Fetch][188] POP3: Can't process mail, email no 8 is empty!

The only thing I can suggest regarding this is that you have competing fetching going on. Check your crontab to make sure you're not fetching twice for some reason (Maybe once under root and once under otrs?)

[jfreeman2nc]

Do I check the Crontab file under OTRS\CRONw to confirm this?

[MichaelR]

Yeah, crythias may be right here, the code that determines it is:

Code: Select all

my $Lines = $PopObject->get($Messageno);
                if ( !$Lines ) {
                    $Self->{LogObject}->Log(
                        Priority => 'error',
                        Message  => "$AuthType: Can't process mail, email no $Messageno is empty!",
                    );
                }

So in the time between when it fetches the mail from the mailbox and the time it takes to process the mail. It is being removed somehow...

[ferrosti]

Check whether you have set otrs.PostMasterMailbox.pl with the '-f' (force) flag somewhere in your cron files.
This program writes a PID to DB and in case it finds a running job at startup it will quit, telling that another process is already running. The only thing that can happen in your scenario is either another system fetching mails at the same time with OTRS being too slow at import (it first retrieves listing, than it imports one by one, then it deletes from server) or you have concurrent Mailbox jobs running using the force flag.

[jfreeman2nc]

I finally figured out the issue, sorry it took so long for a reply. I was working on some old VMs the other day and one accidentially was started. This VM had an older version of OTRS and it was also fetching emails from the same source. I shut down and removed that VM and am no longer having the issue of emails not coming through. Thank you all for your help!

[shenglu]

We have an exchange server, we create a common e-mail ID. When we try to set up a postal account, we found that it only supports POP3 / S and IMAP / S