gator73 not receiving email

[gregsass]

I just submitted a ticket as it appears inbound mail on gator73 does not appear to be working. I am posting this message just to let others know about the problem. For me, it appears to have been down for over 12 hours now, although I just discovered the problem within the last hour. I am waiting for a response to my ticket, but will need to follow it online as I cannot recieve inbound email.

[gregsass]

After a couple of hours of working with support, the problem was identified. They pointed me toward my email filters not letting any messages through. I checked the filters through cpanel and it all looked fine to me. So I opened up the .filter file in a text editor and noticed a couple of strange lines at the begining of the file. To fix the problem, I made a copy of the .filters file, then manually deleted all the entries in the filters file. I then sent some test messages and they were delivered. I then restored all the filters (less the two strange looking lines) via the text editor. I then checked the filters via the cpanel, and all of my discard lines didn't look correct. So I recreated one line then they all were correct. Once this was fixed, it appeared to correct the problem entirely and it appears all of the messages started getting delivered correctly. So messages I thought were gone, were just stuck in a queue somewhere because of the bad lines in the filters file.

Bottom line, you can't always trust cpanel to show you what is really happening. Sometimes looking at the files directly will tell you more than anything else.

Thanks again to support for helping to resolve this problem.

[slapshotw]

Any clue how they got there?

[gregsass]

No, I'm not sure, but I suspect it might be a bug in cpanel or it is the way I use filters. I primarily use filters as an additional spam fighting mechnanism on top of SpamAssassin. With SpamAssassin, what can be searched for is somewhat limited - from addresses, subjects, etc. I've been using filters to search for things such as domain names in headers and other header information (like fake mail coming from my domains) to reroute those messages to a specific mailbox. So I've got a fair number of rules.

Anyway, the bad lines that show up, I think happens when I use the cpanel interface to add an additional rule. After adding the rule, I end up with one or more lines, usually right at the top of the file, similar to this:

$ ""+++++++
$ ""+++++++/dev/null

in the .filter file, where the filter rules are kept. This morning, when I added another entry, cpanel did display a bad rule and allowed me to delete it, which started mail flowing again.

When I get a chance, I will try some more experimenting to see if I can further isolate it. But for now, everytime I add/delete a rule, I'm going to check the file to make sure the bad rules don't show up.

[gregsass]

I've seen this problem reoccur several more times, and now on another server where I manage an account for someone else. Until the problem showed up on the other server, I thought maybe the file was corrupted or something so I backed up the .filter file to my local hard drive, then deleted the file. I then recreated a few rules to see what would happen. Later, I once again noticed mail was not flowing so I logged back into cpanel and check the filters and sure enough, a blank rule was there. So I deleted it again and mail started flowing.

So to me, this is begining to look more and more like a problem with cpanel. I'm thinking I will need to use manually edit the .filter file to add rules.

But I am currious if anyone else using filters is seeing similar problems? Maybe the way I am using filtering rules, primarily as a means of supplimenting SpamAssassin in the fight agains spam, has something to do with it. But I don't think it is the rules, I think it is the way cpanel interacts with the rules file that is causing me the problems.