Email receiving problems after recreating email accounts

Whenever the mail server hosting the email accounts used by FocalScope needs to be recreated after a crash, FocalScope may stop receiving new emails from the restored email accounts. Similarly, whenever email accounts are created anew or transferred to a new mail server, FocalScope may stop receiving new emails even after the email account credentials have been updated in FocalScope. This article details the cause of this phenomenon and how best to restore normal email flow again after personal and / or shared email accounts have been recreated or updated.

Prerequisites

• Creating personal email accounts
• Creating shared email accounts

Scenarios

Recreating email accounts (email account credentials remain the same)

The mail server crashes or is compromised and all email accounts hosted on it need to be recreated. Email account information in FocalScope is left as is to resume functionality once the email accounts have been restored. FocalScope then does not receive new emails from the email accounts.

Updating or transferring email accounts (email account credentials change)

Email accounts on one mail server are either transferred to a new mails server or recreated anew. Email account credentials are then updated in FocalScope. FocalScope then does not receive new emails from the transferred / newly created email accounts.

Troubleshooting

FocalScope gathers data from each email account linked to it, to distinguish new emails from existing ones--and thus when to load new emails from the mail server to the FocalScope database. FocalScope keeps track of how many emails it has retrieved from an email account (e.g., 500), and will only retrieve new emails that are added on top of this count, e.g., 501, 502, 503. 

When an email account is recreated on the mail server or a new account is used (and the credentials of existing linked email accounts updated in FocalScope), the initial score of how many emails FocalScope has retrieved from the email account remains at 503. The recreated / updated email account would first need to exceed this base number in new emails before FocalScope will again retrieve the emails from the mail server and store it in the FocalScope database.

Solution

Restoring email flow from recreated email accounts

After the mail server (and email accounts) have been recreated / updated, reset the corresponding email acocunts 'emails retrieved score' in FocalScope as follows:

1. In the [main menu], click [Screen > Administration]
2. Click the [Administration] tab
3. Navigate to the [E-mail Accounts > Personal / Shared by ticketboxes] folder
4. Double-click the email account and in the [E-mail account Properties], click the [Advanced] tab
5. Click the [Reset] button (highlighted in red in Figure 1) and set the status to [Load all existing emails]
6. Click [Ok] to save changes
7. Normal email flow has now been restored for the account. Repeat points 3-5 for all other affected email accounts

Figure 1 - Resetting initial preloading of emails