Sun 4 Feb 2007
Email Service Recovered 2/4/2007 8:20 A.M.
Posted by Chance Gray under mail.usf.edu , WebMail , News , WebMail_SysNewsA few of you may have noticed the email services actually recovered twice yesterday but failed immediately after coming back online (once at ~ 5 P.M. for about 1/2 hour and once ~ 9 P.M. for about 10 minutes). This time we opted to move the data once again to a new home. This is not our permanent solution however. Ideally the next time we relocate will not be because of hardware failure. We will do it during Spring break or after the end of Spring session giving advanced notice to all of our intentions. Such a move would require minimal downtime.
February 4th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Nice, but my new emails aren’t showing. It says on the side panel that I have 6 new emails but they aren’t in my inbox.
February 4th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Not working yet…. I just spent some time trying to clear out old e-mails and checked the box for about 20 of them, hit delete and nothing happened. Then I tried to delete just one e-mail, and the same thing. NOTHING. I still have not received any new mail since Feb. 2, COME ON!
February 4th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Finally got my old stuff deleted, had to go get more coffee and then close out and come back in. Why should I have to do that just to delete some old stuff? It is also running “slower than molasses in January” (as my mom would say….)
February 4th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Nicole,
If you don’t post using your mail.usf.edu address I cannot determine your account name. Please post using your mail.usf.edu account.
February 4th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Ro,
The queue that build up while the server was down may have increased the load during that time. If you continue having a problem report back here as it may be related to your account.
February 4th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
This is getting out of hand. I use my usf email as my primary email. It frequently is offline and as a result I do not recieve important emails. I was waiting for a very important item to be emailed to me over the weekend. How do I know if I actually recieved it while the system was down?
Paige
February 4th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
why is this web service so unreliable? It really pisses me off.
February 4th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Hi, I know I was sent emails during the outage, but I dont see them anywhere. Also, my account says its 85% full but I cant find any mail to delete to free up space.
Help! I was expectin ga very imp. email.
Kat
February 4th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Since I don’t have any new mail since the outage, i sent an e-mail to my usf account from my yahoo account. The message I received from acomp at my yahoo address reads:
Failed to deliver to ‘’
LOCAL module(account llevitt@helios.acomp.usf.edu) reports:
cannot store: mailbox UID counter is damaged
February 4th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Why does it go on and off? Cant we stick to one server. It has happened 2 times in a week. And 4 times in a month. It is disturbing our studies. Please do necessary work for this at once.
February 4th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Help me out here, please. I haven’t seen anything posted since the 8:20a restore message, and my mailbox is not restored. My folders don’t show up (the ones I have created myself), I’m not receiving e-mail, and the one message I’ve sent doesn’t show up in my sent-mail. I’d ask you to e-mail me about this, but obviously I won’t get the message.
February 4th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Sucks to be you all! I stopped using my USF account long ago. Its a wonderful creation called GMail!
Wishing you all the best!
No Worries
February 4th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Paige,
Please email the details of the message ( from which address, to which address and the time periods involved) to the helpdesk and I will try to locate the message for you.
February 4th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Kat,
Your mail.usf.edu account seems relatively unused. I assume you are mailing from another address to a mail.usf.edu address. Please email the details of the message ( from which address, to which address and the time periods involved) to the helpdesk and I will try to locate the message for you.
February 4th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Linda,
Your mail should work now. Some of the system files for your account had to be removed. As a result you may need to resubscribe to your folders. As far as I can tell your folders look intact.
February 4th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Listen, I know you guys work hard to keep blackboard and webmail running smoothly; however I’m extremely frustrated at how my issue isn’t being resolved in a timely manner. I have an oustanding ticket with you guys (0028?) but I can’ keep waiting for things to be pushed aside. Again I understand you’re busy as several people are having problems, but I failed a class last semester because technical difficulties weren’t a reason for me not turning assignments in online; I am trying my hardest to not let that happen again, but it seems as though webmail is determined to make it happen again. I only have until 8am on Wednesday to have this problem corrected, please take a look at my request. Even if it’s something you can’t fix right away from looking at it, please communicate with me as to what steps can be taken and about how long it will take so I can relay the information to my professors.
P.S. Thankyou for taking the time to read and respond to these posts.
February 4th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Thanks for all your help. Unfortunately, I can’t log in to my account at all. I’m getting the “Unknown user or password incorrect” error page.
February 5th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Linda,
Your account should really work now.
February 5th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Katrina,
I have restored what I could find in your account from the backups on the 30th of January. Since you are posting since then I assume you did not find what you are looking for in what I restored. I will see if there is some additional copy somewhere other than the backups. It would help if you can indicate all activities surrounding these emails on the help desk ticket. Such things as when the messages were originally received/sent and when they were moved from folder to folder.
February 5th, 2007 at 10:58 am
I received those messages from right before the semester starting all the way up until Jan. 29; all of those emails were transfered into the subboxes on the 29. Almost everyone of them had the course listed in the subject line; I’m in GEA2000.502, ANT2000.007, and ARH3001.798 please do what you can to find those, my grades are suffering as of right now because I don’t have information that was in those emails.
February 5th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Katrina,
I have restored a copy of your INBOX which looks like it may contain some of the mails you are looking for. Let me know if I am on the right track.
February 5th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Katrina,
The folder name is -recover and is already subscribed.
February 5th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Kat,
I have restored your account from backup. The files before the restore were clearly corrupted. The restored files did not include the “-recover” folders you mentioned. Let me know if you notice anything else missing. I will try to restore the “-recover” folders you saw before.
February 5th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Kat,
Our backups do not seem to contain any such folders “-recover” for your account. I suspect another tech has been helping you and intended to restore to those folders. Please also keep in mind I can only help you with your mail.usf.edu account. If it is helpful I will to go through logs to find information on your correspondence (who sent to your account and when).
There are multiple versions of your account still on tape. I have only recovered the most recent copy. I would also restore all versions if that is helpful.
February 5th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I just received an important message that ended up in the junk mail box, although I have turned off spam filtering because of all the trouble it has given me.
For some unknown reason, when I tried to MOVE the message back to my inbox, Webmail MARKED IT AS SPAM AND DELETED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It was an important message relating to one of my classes and research I am doing!
Even though spam filtering is off, important stuff still gets sent to my “junk mail” folder, even though I do not have a filter set for that and I DO NOT have spam filtering turned on. I’m going to have to contact the person and have them re-send the message.
At the same time, I’ve had ads selling drugs end up in my inbox!
Will you people please get this worthless system fixed- or junk webmail and go to something that is more reliable and that doesn’t “black hole” important messages???
It also bothers me that messages can be sent from a campus account, and take two or more hours to get into my webmail account!!
By the way- the “Delete and Previous” and “Delete and Next” buttons still screw up the message counter!
February 5th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
I am still at this moment no receiving any emails
February 6th, 2007 at 2:07 am
Yes Chance, you are on the right track and thankyou very much, but I’m still missing several emails including all of the emails from my group in ANT200.007; also my percentage keeps getting higher and now I’m in the red zone (before this problem my account never went above 26%) why is this happening all of a sudden, and why when I delete emails does the percentage get higher? I do appreciate the tedious work you’re doing, and thankyou very kindly, but unfortunately there’s still more to be done.
Keep up the good work!
February 6th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
when I go to mailbox.acomp.usf.edu sometimes it will let me access my account and others it wont. This is really beginning to be very time consuming and annoying, having to try and try and try to just see my mail, please help me.
February 6th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
It says i have 18446744073709551615 emails in my inbox even though i don’t. I cant receive any new emails they get bounced back. what do i do>????
February 7th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I have the same problem with Alyssa, I haven’t been recieving emails since webmail crashed days ago. If you guys can help me solve this problem i would be grateful…heres another email address that you can contact me at… juspeachy1885@yahoo.com….or at least tell me where i need to go to get the problem fixed.
-THUY
February 7th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
My my new messeges are gone again. Please Help!
February 8th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
I still cant check my mail. It wont let me even log in to see if I have mail. Every time i put my password in it wont go at all! HELP!
February 8th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
My professor said he sent me an email this morning around 8am but I never received it and it is still not here although I can get into webmail. How many other emails am I missing?
February 8th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Yesterday at 400 i sent out a very important email to a professor and i was wondering why it isnt in my sent box- i dont think the teacher recieved it and would like to send it again. help!
February 8th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Okay, I have 8.7k of mail total in all of my folders combined; why then does it say I am using 57.7% of my 52.5M
Please, I’m really confused!
February 9th, 2007 at 6:01 am
Katrina,
Your quota should report correctly now.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:08 am
Those of you missing mails, I will restore from what copies we have (from tape and other filesystems). They should be restored by Noon today.
February 9th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Gina,
There is a folder named sent-mail-recover which looks like it contains the message you are talking about. One of the other techs must have restored it. I assumed your opened a help desk ticket but I do not see one. Please post here if your message is still missing.
February 9th, 2007 at 8:17 am
Lauren Perkins,
Your account was probably locked temporarily as the new filesystem was synced up. It should work now.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Why weren’t the copies of missing email restored automatically as part of the recovery process? We shouldn’t have to point out something is missing to get something done, the only reason I knew about that missing email from the prof is because he told us but there may be many more I am unaware of which concerns me. I did actually finally get that email this morning, I can tell its the original one by the send date and time on the header, but that appears to be the only restored email and I know that I must have received other emails during that time period.
February 9th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
I just found out about one email I didn’t receive. It was sent Thursday morning (Feb. 8, 9:51 am). I am wondering if there are other emails that I may have missed…? If there is any way to check on that or at least let me know if you suspect emails are being lost, that would be great. Thanks.
February 9th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
You would think after all the practice they’ve had lately recovering from a crash, they’d be really good at it by now and have developed an efficient and effective system to recover everyone’s email and get everything back up and running….you know this is just going to happen again and again so get a procedure done to get things done properly so people aren’t left with screwed up mailboxes and missing emails afterwards that you have to address one by one
February 11th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I finally removed the “Junk Email” folder, although I never created it in the first place. Hopefully, that will STOP WebMail from catching important messages and redirecting them there, while letting spam through.
I have spam filtering turned off- yet it still seems to be causing problems. When will you people ever fix this problem????
Seriously, I’d tell whoever you get WebMail from to straighten out their act, or get us something that is reliable and WORKS.
We don’t need fancy bells and whistles- just something that gets the job done!!!
February 12th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
My webmail box still says I am using ~66% of my mail capacity when my mailbox is completely empty!! Also, I still have not gotten any recovered mail from Feb 1st-4th and I was sent a very important email during that time that I need to get. Help!!!!!!!
February 12th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Thanks for resolving my mail capacity problem
. But I am still missing emails. Also, mail that should be forwarded to my chuma1.cas.usf.edu account only gets ‘copied’ there because I still see it in my mail.usf.edu inbox and not all the mail made it to the chuma1 account.
February 12th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Kat,
I have restored to a folder, “Jan27″, in your account. This is the most recent copy of your account prior to the February 3rd crash. As far as I can tell it looks like your account was forwarding to an Arts and Sciences (cas.usf.edu) address between Feb 1st and Feb the 4th. You should contact their helpdesk at 974-2418 for help recovering mail during that period.
February 12th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Kat,
The quota should work now.
February 13th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Hi, my mail is still not forwarding properly. Like I said before, mail that should be forwarded to my chuma1.cas.usf.edu account only gets ‘copied’ there because I still see it in my mail.usf.edu inbox and not all the mail mades it to the chuma1 account.
I have my mail forwarded so I don’t have to check two mailboxes all day!!!
February 13th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Kat,
Forwarding certainly makes sense. I will resolve why it has not been consistent for your account.
February 14th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Hi, just wondering if anyone is checking on those lost emails for me. Thanks.
February 14th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Hey Chance,
Again thank you so much for your help on Monday. However, three of the folders you sent me don’t have links for me to get to them. I can’t look at the folders for FEB. 6,7,8 and JAN. 12; could you take a look at that and see why it won’t work? I’d like to get to those emails.
February 14th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
FIX WEBMAIL!!!
I just discovered that for some reason the “Junk Email” folder had been re-installed again in my list, and had a WEBMAIL GENERATED ERROR MESSAGE (about a bad email address associated with a student) in it. I deleted that folder a few days ago, and it’s come back and giving me headaches again!!!
I have spam filtering turned off because it has created so much headache for me. I do NOT want the problems coming back! Please fix this frustrating irritant!
February 14th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Thanks, but now it’s saying
ERROR: Could not complete request.
Query: SELECT “Feb06/Important”
Reason Given: mailbox does not exist
We’re almost there …
February 14th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Katrina,
They should work now.
February 14th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Mr. Bowers,
I see no “Junk Email” folder in your account. Have you deleted it again? If it gets created again leave it in place and post here. This will help us track down what is causing it.
February 16th, 2007 at 9:36 am
FIX THIS EMAIL!!!
now it says page can not be displayed.
February 16th, 2007 at 11:21 am
It’s back, and I’ve had to copy several important messages from “Junk Email” to the proper folders.
It seems to have precedence over the filters I created.
If I try to copy any messages out of “Junk Email” to the inbox- the message only goes right back to Junk Email. I have to copy them to specific (personally created) subfolders to keep the message from ending up back in Junk Email.
If it’s the spam filter (as I suspect, even though I turned it off and Webmail shows that it is off), it has ignored a half dozen spams and “caught” several important messages.
February 16th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Robert Bowers,
Do you use any other email software to check your mail other than webmail? Outlook and possibly Outlook express will create a Junk E-mail folder such as the one you are seeing. The email server for mail.usf.edu uses a folder called SPAM.
February 16th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
While I’ve used Outlook at times to check messages (and I’ll disable it), the “Junk Email” folder has been there for a long time- long before I used Outlook (mainly to get copies of emails so I could clean out my folders). It’s also been a long-time problem, catching messages for some time.
The “Junk Email” folder is accessable through Webmail- and I doubt that Outlook would cause Webmail to create a folder like that.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Email is still being delayed. I emailed someone from my gmail to a usf email address and she did not receive it until the next day, over 12 hours later. My mail is never delayed when I send from gmail to non usf email.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:41 am
I am having trouble emailing someone with a usf email address, I get this error message. How can mail.usf.edu be an invalid domain??
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: Parse Error: Illegal To: address (invalid domain name): “mfrey2@mail.usf.edu”
February 20th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Hey good job, my web mail works about half the time…oh wait thats a 50%…
February 20th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
I have a very important e-mail that I have been trying to see since yesterday and I also need to reply to that email. Everytime I try to see my mail it just says page can not be displayed. I am really getting tired of this. It has been happending on and off for the past 2 months. Please fix this problem ASAP!!!
February 20th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Lauren,
Please forward a copy of the permanent failure message to the helpdesk.
February 20th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Lauren Perkins,
What is the folder the message is in and what is the timestamp on it? BTW, I have subscribed your account to your SPAM folder so it should show up in the list.
February 21st, 2007 at 2:43 pm
The page cannot be displayed
The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.
Please try the following:
Click the Refresh button, or try again later.
If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
To check your connection settings, click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options. On the Connections tab, click Settings. The settings should match those provided by your local area network (LAN) administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).
See if your Internet connection settings are being detected. You can set Microsoft Windows to examine your network and automatically discover network connection settings (if your network administrator has enabled this setting).
Click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options.
On the Connections tab, click LAN Settings.
Select Automatically detect settings, and then click OK.
Some sites require 128-bit connection security. Click the Help menu and then click About Internet Explorer to determine what strength security you have installed.
If you are trying to reach a secure site, make sure your Security settings can support it. Click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options. On the Advanced tab, scroll to the Security section and check settings for SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, PCT 1.0.
Click the Back button to try another link.
Cannot find server or DNS Error
Internet Explorer
February 28th, 2007 at 9:45 am
I have been having problems with my mailbox for the past few weeks. Everytime I open it I get mail from last year. None of my recent mails are available. Like once awhile, I dont know what happens but I do see my new mail. What am I suppose to do??, and when is the technical problem going to be fixed? because all my schoolwork goes through usf mailbox.
Thanks
February 28th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
When I delete my mail I can not recover it in the trash bin. How can I change this where my mail is not atomatically deleted from my trash bin?
Thanks
March 1st, 2007 at 1:36 am
All of the e-mails in my inbox dissapeared last week, and again today. I need those e-mails for class, how do I get them back? Thank you for any help…
March 1st, 2007 at 9:23 pm
My mail space, or whatever it’s called, says I am using 9.9M out of the alotted M space. I have 0 messeges in all of my folders. What is taking up the space?
March 6th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Ok.. soo when i click delete my mail it wont delete and.When i get new mail it comes in diff places of my mailbox. Sometimes it comes in on the last page sometimes in the middle of other pages.. but never in order.. can u fix it
March 14th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
I just recently got this email account. i got the first email, but no others after that. i even sent a few from my other email account and its still not receiving them.
March 15th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
When I try to log in to my account, I get the following error message: Preference database error (connect failed). Exiting abnormally.
I’m a TA and OPS Staff, and I need my webmail to do my job(s). Please advise.
March 15th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Problem seems to have gone away. Nevermind…