EX in evaluation mode

Not that I am aware of.

Actually, I am not able to recover some shortcut mails using EmailXtract shortcut task. I tried through the plug-in as well as Open the shortcut from the mailbox but nothing works.

This is under evaluation and is now getting authorized today since I was told that these things can happen under evaluation period. EX corrupts its own indexes and SQL DB.

Would these mails ever be recoverable post getting this authorized? Even if not, I want to know where did the things go wrong to be careful in future. I have archiving logs with me with the detailed log option and I could see message with same message ID archived without errors. I am sure message ID is unique to each message.

Please suggest.

You should be fine. I think there's a rumor going around that an EX system running under eval somehow 'corrupts' different components of the environment. This is not the case. If you're getting an error message please post it here.

I had a large mailbox that was archived and shortcut earlier. I tried recovering this using the Shortcut task. It gave me an error for around 59 emails and skipped the recovery. Following messages came in:

Cannot allocate space, database is corrupt.
Skipping, failed to restore shortcut.
*** NOTES Error in mailbox ABC: Network operation did not complete in a reasonable amount of time; please retry

I ran msgidchecker for the items that could not get restored. It shows the volume name but a NO under Exists. I have been made to believe that this means that the mails cannot be recovered & either they were not archived properly OR they are lost from the archives.

I have the old archive logs which show successful archival of these mails. I checked the message ID at the time of archival and compared with the ones shown in the recovery error now.

Here comes the license issue. I have been told that since the product was running in eval mode, it could have corrupted its indexes and SQL db therefore we have these entries in DB for which mails are not availble for recovery. The best resolution is to use msgidchecker tod elete these entries and download these mails from tape backup, rearchive selected mails, reshortcut and test recovery.

I need to know the technical reason for the possible corruption. License does not seem to be a good reason. If reindexing could help recover these, it would be great.

Any suggestions to this would be great.

hi Anuj,

WHo has informed you that in eval mode you will have corruption in indexes or so on ? I am not aware of such limitations so far.

Also let me know if you were trying to play with the rules, in most of the cases either rules or AV causes such issues. Archive job will mark a message for archival, but if there are rules which could end up discarding messages then you will loose those messages even though archive job will show you that its archived.

In heathcheckl if msgidchecker is reporting no message in SQL then good chances are you are missing those. There could be something wrong with your configuration too, due to whcih these could end up in one of the BADDIR directories.

But since its a test environment, i could not comment much.

I am not familiar with the error messages you posted.

Just to add a little perhaps, some customers will install an EX test server and shortcut a certain number of messages. Later the test server is reformatted and a new EX server is built for production. The archived data is lost and cannot be recovered unless the customer has a backup of the EX test server. Shortcuts that point to the lost test data cannot be recovered. I'm not saying this is your situation however this is one way to account for the missing message data.

Actually, there is a mix up of things happening. The bigger concern is to recover these mails which are getting skipped in recovery task.

If they are not in msgidchecker, they are lost for ever. Why?

Rajan,

You mentioned: Archive job will mark a message for archival, but if there are rules which could end up discarding messages then you will loose those messages even though archive job will show you that its archived.

Is it not unfair? It goves an indication that the message is archived but when you try to recover from archives, you don't get it.

Just also wanted to know, if we shortcut, these messages not archived due to rules, they would also not get shortcutted if we select "Shortcut previously archived messages".

The threads I post are a mix of problems I am facing and things I thought of just trying to learn more by imagination OR preparing proactively for probable future problems.

Hi Rajan,

No rules as of now: we plan that we will configure journalling we would use rules to journal specific mailboxes since this is Domino environment.

No Anti Virus. Msidchecker says NO for these messages. There is nothing in any of the baddir OR dropdir directories also.

When I worked on this a couple of months back, we archived, shortcut and recover messages and mailboxes after that. We did Plugin, Web based, open shortcut, EX task all types of recoveries.

I am involved again when they are not able to recover the messages and the messages are not visible in either of these. I have logs that say messages were archived.

What could lead to this loss of messages? The only two things I know that happened there are: Domino server had some issues and they changed the EX service account password. I don't think these should be responsible.

I am therefore also exploring other options like size of mailboxes or the possibility of rearchving and reshortcutting doing the damage.

I need to answer the reasons for all this very soon.

Please check EX Admin guide and EX training material for more info on rules. One should be very careful while placing rules in the environment(look at the warning messages you get when running emailxtract tasks) and should always keep unmatched rule in place for precaution.

If EX is in eval mode then you cannot create folders and then different rules which rules out using unmatched rules functionality.

If you are doing this for testing only I am unsure how much help would I be to find out the root cause that why messages are missing. Following are few conditions when I could expect something like this to happen.

1. As Frank mentioned emails were archived and then EX was cleand up, EMX files were disposed off.
2. Someone disposed monthly data and took away containers in question.
3. AV took out email (you have already ruled that out).
4. There were rules in place which were not configured properly.

If more anaysis would be required then I guess only a support engineer could help.