Issue Plesk Storing Emails on "No Mailbox" Accounts

[DECEiFER]

Hi all,

I've done some googling and couldn't find anything specific to this issue that we've noticed today. Since we updated from Onyx (17.8.11) to Obsidian (from 18.0.20 up) on our hosting servers, it seems that email accounts without mailboxes (unchecked) are storing emails. A long-time customer was using one as a forwarder to two of their actual mailboxes on the same domain and it reached capacity, and stopped working. The funny thing is, the mailbox size (albeit grayed out) was custom set to only 80MB (perhaps from a previous configuration some time ago, but certainly not recently), hence why it got full so quickly. So, I went in and checked the mailbox option, selected the default size, applied, and unchecked it again, and applied. That seemed to fix it - mail began to flow in and forward as normal from that point on, and are no longer being stored under the No Mailbox account. We checked a few other cases on a few other Plesk servers of ours and mails have been stacking up in the storage for these "No Mailbox" accounts since early March, around the time we did the update to Obsidian. So I'm thinking it's more than a coincidence.

If it helps, the servers are running CentOS 6 and 7 and are used for shared hosting.

Has anyone else run into this issue (maybe at this time unknowingly)? Specifically if you have No Mailbox accounts set prior to updating to Obsidian without having being modified since.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Brujo]

maybe there was a issue with the upgrade or exist before, i suggest you run plesk repair mail once
https://docs.plesk.com/en-US/obsidian/administrator-guide/74652/

 

[TomBoB]

a client had a very similar issue which we discovered just two days ago.
originally that mail account was in use. Because of restructuring, the mailbox got turned off and forwarding was put in place. (disabling the mailbox in my understanding should remove all leftover mails in it - is this incorrect?)
anyways when the mailbox was reenabled (as a temp measure) many old mails going back to september last year were found in it. (still? / again?)

Found it a very odd behaviour. But didn't think about it any further as no limits were reached and it had no negative impact for this client.

 

[Brujo]

(disabling the mailbox in my understanding should remove all leftover mails in it - is this incorrect?)

just disabling a mailbox does not delete mails, afaik all those mail files will just hang around forever, orphaned from the control panel. See the NOte in the knowledgebase article
https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001256633-How-to-disable-a-mailboxMany run also in the issue to enable forwarding and let mailbox on... then the mailbox will run full after a while.
As I remember there was here in the forum a discussion about it and some clean up scripts / ideas which check for inactiv mailboxes and purge old mails or remove mailbox

https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/...-a-mailbox-without-logging-in-to-the-mailbox-

 

[ptheroguy]

I am having the same issue on several accounts that are email forward only. I have triple checked and the mailbox is Not Checked. It keeps running out of space on these user accounts because the email has 1000's of email that has already been forwarded but now seeing that a copy of every email is being stored somewhere... The problem compounds when the backup runs and now I have twice the space used then the next day another back up which now triples the space used but should not be.

Thoughts??

Version 18.0.30 Update #2, last updated on Oct 5, 2020 03:43 AM

CentOS 6.10 (Final)