[otrs] OTRS : Duplicate emails gets via POP3

[Marco Ferreira]

Hi All,

We have installed the last otrs version (3.1.10-01) but some times we receive duplicate emails on mailbox of otrs, this emails were obtained via POP3 account.  We have cases that a email it's duplicate 100 times.

Anyone had this problem ?

Regards,
Marco 

[Jan.D...@bertelsmann.de]

Hi Marco.

 

It occurs with our 2.4.10 installation. Switching from POP3S to IMAPS and increasing the frequency of fetching mails (every nine minutes atm) helped a little.

I have no idea where this comes from exactly, but I’m pretty sure it belongs to the imo heavy use and the high number of POP3 accounts and mails within these. I haven’t seen this behavior on our 3.0 or 3.1 installations (which have much lower load).

 

Regards

Jan Dreyer

 

[Gerald Young]

Jan's problem may be because of actually duplicated emails, though.
Multiple POP3 environments could mean users may be sending to multiple
addresses simultaneously.
Marco's issue seems to be emails that aren't removed from the mailbox.
This could be for different reasons, among which, for instance, gmail
account settings that aren't set to allow items to be deleted when
downloaded. Or just a stuck message. If another mailbox utility can be
used to successfully POP3/delete the entrie(s), this may be adequate.
If it, too, can't remove the email entries, the problem is at the
server.

> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> OTRS mailing list: otrs - Webpage: http://otrs.org/
> Archive: http://lists.otrs.org/pipermail/otrs
> To unsubscribe: http://lists.otrs.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/otrs
---------------------------------------------------------------------
OTRS mailing list: otrs - Webpage: http://otrs.org/
Archive: http://lists.otrs.org/pipermail/otrs
To unsubscribe: http://lists.otrs.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/otrs

[Jan.D...@bertelsmann.de]

Hi Gerald.

Duplicated mails occur, but that's not the issue I or Marco (as you stated)
was talking about. I have about 40-50 Mailaccounts configured in that
system, but mails sometimes arrive more than that number in the queue.
I also considered that it may be that the mailbox doesn't get cleared after
fetching the mails. But that's not the case either. In the logs I can see
that the same mail is fetched many times _at_the_same_time_ (well, nearly
the same time, it lasts some seconds to finish that)!
I haven't checked if that mails are on the mailserver that often, but as the
headers (seen with "src"-view in otrs) are exactly the same, I don't believe
so. To me it seems that PostMaster.pl duplicates mails sometimes. I just
have no clue why or under which circumstances.

Regards
Jan Dreyer
IT Administrator / Operations Team / M-IT OMS

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----

> Von: otrs-b...@otrs.org [mailto:otrs-b...@otrs.org] Im Auftrag von

> Gerald Young
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 2. Oktober 2012 14:04
> An: User questions and discussions about OTRS.
> Betreff: Re: [otrs] OTRS : Duplicate emails gets via POP3

[Gerald Young]

Jan,

If I could, I'd alias all those emails to one box and pop once. I'd
also check if Cron postmastermailbox wasn't running under multiple
usernames (root and otrs).

[Marco Ferreira]

Jan, thanks for you help.

Gerald, we  just have configured the script  "otrs.PostMasterMailbox.pl"  via crontab for user otrs, with this entry :

*/10 * * * *    $HOME/bin/otrs.PostMasterMailbox.pl >> /dev/null

But we have this script  "postmaster_mailbox" on directory $OTRS_HOME/var/cron/

cat postmaster_mailbox

# --
# cron/postmaster_mailbox - postmaster_mailbox cron of the OTRS
# Copyright (C) 2001-2009 OTRS AG, http://otrs.org/
# --
# $Id: postmaster_mailbox.dist,v 1.3 2009/11/09 15:24:13 mn Exp $
# --
# This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details, see
# the enclosed file COPYING for license information (AGPL). If you
# did not receive this file, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.txt.
# --

# fetch emails every 10 minutes
*/10 * * * *    $HOME/bin/otrs.PostMasterMailbox.pl >> /dev/null
[root@gen01prd cron]#


Do you have this in your configuration or you know if this script call the otrs.PostMasterMailbox.pl script ?

Marco

[Gerald Young]

bin/Cron.sh will load everything in otrs/var/cron (in windows, .dist
won't matter: they all get loaded, in linux, only items without .dist
will load).

[David Boyes]

Depends a lot on the POP server implementation, too. If the POP server is set to rate-limit incoming connections (default on recent versions of Exchange, and most of the “free” email providers these days), the client (in this case, OTRS) will see the full list of messages in the mailbox, but will be allowed to get only a certain number per connection attempt, and will not be able to connect more than once per X minutes. This confuses the OTRS POP client a lot.

 

The best permanent solution we’ve found is to use fetchmail to interact with the POP server, and a local SMTP server listening only on the loopback address with local aliases for the OTRS queues. Fetchmail is much smarter about dealing with obscure remote mailbox problems, and has super-helpful logging if it has problems.

 

[Gerald Young]

And in my case, I use procmail which has none of these issues and
receives mail instantly into OTRS.

[Marco Ferreira]

I will check our configuration of our pop server, I will send feedback soon.

Thanks for your help.

Marco

-----Original Message-----
From: Gerald Young <cryt...@gmail.com>
Reply-to: User questions and discussions about OTRS. <ot...@otrs.org>
To: User questions and discussions about OTRS. <ot...@otrs.org>

[David Boyes]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: otrs-b...@otrs.org [mailto:otrs-b...@otrs.org] On Behalf Of
> Gerald Young
> And in my case, I use procmail which has none of these issues and receives
> mail instantly into OTRS.

Agreed. Procmail wins big.

But, if you're stuck with the POP option (a horrible, horrible idea, IMHO), procmail doesn't help w/o the local MTA to invoke it, at which point the local aliases file works about equally well, and it's one less thing to maintain.

[Gerald Young]

at which point the local aliases file works about equally well

Thank you for that hint. Of course it should work that way. I would have hoped that to be the case, anyway (didn't bother to try it). One thing I did use procmail for at one implementation was to alert a department manager (cc email) when a ticket request came from a department employee. Of course, it didn't have the ticket number, but otherwise it was a good-enough workaround.

[David Boyes]

One thing I did use procmail for at one implementation was to alert a department manager (cc email) when a ticket request came from a department employee. Of course, it didn't have the ticket number, but otherwise it was a good-enough workaround.

 

Yeah – there is where procmail really shines. You can do all sorts of useful things to the incoming email before it hits OTRS.

[Marco Ferreira]

Hi,

We found the problem and solved with workarround.

So, our problem is not related with pop server or imap server.when the backup of mysql DB it's running (with gzip compress) I don't know why (we 'are still investigating) the process otrs.PostMasterMailbox.pl crash, now we stopped running this script during the backup and solved the problem.

Thanks for our support.

Marco