Cannot delete some messages

[forestall]

I have two mail boxes that have a few mail messages that cannot be deleted. This occurs from IMAP clients like Outlook as well as from the Ability WebMail client. In webmail, the user checks next these messages and selects delete but they do not disappear from the list. Other messages can be deleted.

In Outlook, the messages appear to mark for deletion but the next time send/receive occurs the messages reappear as new messages.

[rob]

Failing to delete messages is something that can more easily affect IMAP4/POP3, but generally WebMail is usually very reliable due to its 'direct access' method (it doesn't sit upon a protocol like a mail client). What this means is that if WEbMail cannot delete the files, then quite likely something on the file system is preventing this. I would recommend checking that the actual files are not set to read only, or are not currently being access by other software. You should be able to test this by trying to manually delete the files (if you have multiple mails in your inbox folder then you can identify the right files by the modified date, which matches the date in WebMail).

[philsbbs]

I also have this problem I have 3 in junk folder could not delete via webmail had to delete at server level.

Same mail box had 6 emails in deleted also that would not delete, deleted them at server level only to get bad email emails which I cannot delete.

Any ideas.

[rob]

Bad mails are generally only a temporary repsonse to external deletion of mail files. Basically the mail server caches the contents of a mail box when a user is logged in, and so the missing mails are detected. When all instances of that user log out (including all WebMail sessions being set to log out), the cache is dropped from memory. The next time the user logs in, the bad mails should have disappeared. A quick way of forcing this is to reload the mail server.

[philsbbs]

Mails disappeared as you suggested when the mailbox logged back in.