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Email - FTP User Tips and Tricks



Increase the inbox size for an email user beyond 50M

The Site Manager limits inbox sizes for what is stored on the server to under 50M for POP accounts. This is to help ensure that the emails arrive quickly and there is no corruption.

  • If you do need to increase this for some reason, this can be done by editing the /etc/features files.
  • You will just change the value after mail= for the particular username you are interested in.
  • -1 is disabled, 0 is unlimited, and any positive integer is the inbox size in MB.

If you are on a POP account, going above 50MB risks e-mail loss through mailbox corruption. We do not recommend setting your quota above 50MB. Please either set your mail client to remove mail from the server after 5-10 days, or upgrade your Site Manager mail server to Dovecot IMAP [requires a dedicated IP address].


Please see this link for instructions on how to install IMAP.

POP Locks

If a POP3 mail user is not responding and you cannot connect to it, check for a /var/spool/mail/.user.pop file.

  • If there is one, check to see if there is an active pop process with a start time that matches that of the .user.pop file if so, kill it, then make a backup of the /var/spool/mail/user file and remove the .user.pop file.
  • If there is a user.lock file, which means someone/something is actively connected to the mailbox.
  • Once the popd process has been killed, you can remove the user.lock file, and then the .user.pop file.

Permissions Errors

If an email user is getting “-ERR [SYS/PERM] Unable to process From lines (envelopes), change recognition modes or check for corrupted mail drop.”

First, check the /var/spool/mail/user file, and make sure the top line looks correct, i.e. “From user@domain.com ”. If it does perform the following:
        1)    cd /var/spool/mail
        2)    mv user user.bak
        3)    touch user
        4)    From putty, telnet domain.com 110, login with the username and password
        5)    cat user.bak >> user
        6)    telnet into the user account again, to make sure it works
        7)    try logging in again


FTP Directories

When setting up or modifying an FTP user there is a check box that says "Use Existing Directory".
This checkbox does two things at the same time.
            1) It will prevent the destination folder from being overwritten
            2) It will attempt to move the user's current Home directory (if any) to the new destination
    
In most cases, this works without any problems, but if you are changing an existing FTP user and you want to change their FTP Home directory, this may cause a conflict. It will give an error similar to the following:
    
        A system error has occurred.
        Please try again, and if it persists, contact your service provider.
    
This is because it was not able to transfer over the current directory to overwrite the new specified directory.
    
One solution is to delete the user and their home directory, then re-add the user pointing to the correct directory.

If you want to keep the files, you may need to transfer them over first.
Alternatively, you could edit the file /etc/passwd and carefully change the path for that user. (I recommend backing up the file first)

Please see this link for instructions on how to install IMAP:



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