Email Forwarding Not Functioning

[KRT-UK]

I've been using cPanel for years now and have had no material issues but in the last few days have started to experience a problem with email forwarding. I can pinpoint the timing of the start of the problem to sometime between 5:38pm on Thu 3rd June and 7:10pm on Thu 3rd June by looking at "Track Delivery".

I have multiple Email Forwards set up on the account (some to external gmails and some to mailboxes) and then separately I have a default address. Up until Thu 5:38pm if an email came in and was forwarded via a Mail Forwarder then that was the end of the story. However, from 7:10pm on Thu, if an email arrives for which a Forwarder has been set up, then the email is forwarded but the email is then also forwarded to the default address. This process is identical regardless of whether the email is being forwarded to an external email or to an internal email box. Hence now, when I go into "Track Delivery", nearly every email has a duplicate entry showing an entry for (a) where it's meant to be forwarded to, and (b) an entry for it also being forwarded to the default address.

Has there been a change in the underlying software that I've missed? Is email forwarding now meant to function like this? Or has something broken?

 

[cPJustinD]

Hello KRT-UK! Could you provide us with an example of one such email from /var/log/exim_mainlog? You should be able to retrieve the Exim ID from these logs. Once you've retrieved the Exim ID of an affected email, could you provide us with the following command output? Be sure to replace $EXIM-ID with the email's actual Exim id:

exigrep $EXIM-ID /var/log/exim_mainlog

This information should provide us with a better understanding of what is occurring. We look forward to hearing back from you!

 

[KRT-UK]

Hi cPJustinD. I'm sorry but I don't really know what you mean. I've searched on the cPanel and I can't find anything called "exim" and using File Manager doesn't help. I think that you're asking me to use SSH but I've never used that before and this guide here:

New User Tutorial: Basic SSH Usage

If you have an account on a cPanel server with shell access or your own VPS server or Dedicated server running Linux then SSH is a powerful tool to have in your skill set. SSH (aka Secure Shell) is a way of logging into your server from a remote computer such as your home desktop […]

www.liquidweb.com

is written in a foreign language. is the problem that I've highlighted an uncommon one?

 

[cPJustinD]

Hello again KRT-UK!! I apologize for any confusion. You are correct in that I was referring to SSH. I have not seen reports of this issue specifically, so it doesn't appear to be all too common.

You should also be able to retrieve the Exim ID of an affected email from within WHM in WHM » Mail Queue Manager. The Exim ID will be listed under Message-ID.

Once you've retrieved the Exim ID, you can then use the command line from within WHM in WHM » Terminal to run the command I provided previously. For your convenience, I've provided it once more below:

exigrep $EXIM-ID /var/log/exim_mainlog

However, it may be best to open a ticket as we may need to review the specific Exim ID more closely to truly understand what is occurring. Could you complete the steps above and open a support ticket that includes your original description of the issue as well as the output of the command above? You can submit a support ticket by clicking the "Submit a ticket" link in my signature below. If you're unable to access SSH or Terminal to retrieve the output requested above, you can provide the Message-ID of an affected email found in WHM » Mail Queue Manager in the support ticket, and our analysts should be able to search the logs using that unique string.

 

[KRT-UK]

Hi cPJustinD, thanks for the response. I've concluded that I've probably come to the wrong place to ask these questions and have checked in with the support desk of my website host. They've come back with the response:


"This is a known issue with the latest update of cPanel. The users of the cPanel platform have advised the creators of cPanel regarding this issue and they have promised to provide a fix in one of the next updates.

However, since we are not the developers of cPanel, we are not able to advise you when this issue will be fixed.

In the meantime, there is a temporary fix, which you can try - you can create actual mailboxes for the forwarders and this way messages sent to those mailboxes will not be delivered to your catchall mailbox."


This would seem to suggest that you should have others raising the same issue here though?

 

[cPJustinD]

Hello again! We may have others raising the same issue. However, I'm not aware of any updates that have caused forwarded emails also being forwarded to the default address if the address exists and no additional forwarders are specified. In this case, we would need to review the logs on the server to understand what is occurring truly.

Did your host happen to provide you any logs or additional context that lead them to the conclusion that this was a known issue with recent cPanel updates?