Wednesday, March 5, 2008

IT WTF : Help ! I cannot read my email !

It's very common for us to see Lotus Notes related problems on a daily basis. But this one beats them all hands down. Somewhere in January, a user logged a call that says the user was not able to read any emails after performing an archive operation.

Archiving is a bugbear that refuses to go away. In order to conserve server space, there is a upper limit imposed on the size of the mailbox. So in order to free up space, users can either delete or archive their emails.

My engineer couldn't find the root of the problem, so the case was escalated to me. I arranged a remote access session with the user and took a peek. The lotus client launched and the user cleared the authentication successfully. Then came the mystery of the day. the user's mailbox cannot be open.

I started asking questions. Ok, the user was trying to archive emails. Then he started bitching at how little mailbox space was available. As I was half-heartedly listening to him, I was trying hard to get more clues from his computer. Then it strike me when I was looking at the email servers. One of his mailbox was still intact while another was gone in another server. Oh ya, he mentioned something about deleting all his documents but still unable to send any email.

HE HAS DELETED HIS OWN MAILBOX


For some crappy reasons, the email administrator gave him full rights to his email account and the user in a over zealous attempt to free up more space, deleted his mailbox instead of deleting his emails. So he ended up with no space because there is no mailbox.

Please people, for your own sake, please stick to my archiving guide and stop trying to play smart. I don't need the extra work. Thank you very much

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