mailbox corruption

[scotch33]

I have a pop3 mailbox on a user account that has suddenly stopped working.

mail that is being sent to is is bouncing back.

Other mailboxes on the same domain/mx/account are all fine.

I have tried...

deleting the box and adding it again - the propbelm remains consistent

restarting the mail server - again no change

deleting the mailbox, restarting the mail server and thenadding the mailbox again. Again no joy.

The outlook express error when I try to send from it is - The message could not be sent because one of the recipients was rejected by the server. The rejected e-mail address was 'the_kumkwat@hotmail.com'. Subject 'test', Account: 'mail.novus-talisman.co.uk', Server: 'mail.novus-talisman.co.uk', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '451 Temporary local problem - please try later', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 451, Error Number: 0x800CCC79

Finally - I can access the main webmail login to get to three mail programs (squrrel, roundcube, hoard) but when i try to use one of them to access the mail, it rejects the password.

On all other mails on the domain it is fine.

I have not come up against a corrupted mailbox that will not recreate on re-add. can anyone advise me?

Thank you.

John

[vanessa]

Usually when I see a 451 error it's because the domain isn't listed in /etc/localdomains, but if your other email accounts are working this probably isn't the issue. You can try manually removing the account folders from ~/mail/domain.com/user, ~/etc/domain.com/passwd, and ~/etc/domain.com/shadow, then readding it to see if that fixes the issue.

What do your mail logs say?

[scotch33]

Thanks Vanessa, I think I will try what you say - but again this is a bit first time for me so I just wanted to confirm my actions to make sure I don't kill anything !

So in my /home/folder are all my accounts

then in the account in question there is the mail / domain name folder / email box in question - so I delete this

also in mail / domain name folder / etc therre is 'passwords' - this is a file not a folder - do i open this and delete the entry for the offending mailbox, or delete the whole file - won't that kill the passwords for the other mailboxes?

finally, i don't have the 'shadow' you mention either as a folder or a file - so not sure about this one.

Ok - then the last thing is my mail logs - I am trying to find them, where would they be?

Thanks!

john

[vanessa]

Your mailbox password/shadow files should be in:

/home/mainusername/etc/domain/passwd
/home/mainusername/etc/domain/shadow

Don't delete the entire files, just the entry for the mail user you are removing. Then remove their parent mailbox folder from:

/home/mainusername/mail/domain

Mail logs are in /var/log/exim_mainlog -- try a tail -f on it while you attempt to check/send mail, and see what it says