I keep getting one or two emails a day that have " " located in the subject line, and the emails are blank. Im sure its some type of spam mail.

Problem is this...

If I get one of those sent to a pop3 account, it times out and wont allow you to download the rest of your email.

The only way to fix the problem is by logging into webmail and deleting it.


Anyone else having the same problem?

I am getting the same thing all across all of our servers. It is knocking out clients email every single day and we get at least 15 calls a day about it.
The only way to get rid of them is to kill the file from their qmail mailbox, or webmail allows you to login and delete that bad message.
I figured it was some kind of attack or something just to cause an inconvenience. It won't harm anything and doesn't stop email from going to the mailbox, but as stated it does stop the user from getting mail with their mail client.
If someone has a way to fix this, god that would be so much appreciated.
This has been going on for Months now.


kriscad, your not alone!

I read something about this one the other day again.

Check with your clients to see if they're using Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus product on their local machine. If they do, supposedly they can disable Email Scanning momentarily those blank emails will be downloaded as normal mail would.

Not a good solution, but better than having to log into webmail if it works. The problem, in my mind, is that the potential is there that an email with a virus attachment could be downloaded during this time without being quarentined. But the Real Time protection should still catch it if someone tries to open such an attachment.

same here..

This plague plesk since V6 :-)
Not sure if this came from outlook (problem look like to apear whit outlook) or plesk but this started in V6.


not sure on 7.02 .. i havent see this problem as now

Someone have try whit another email client ?

maybe thats why... i run Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus, and its happened to my own accounts on there.

Hello,

This has nothing to do with Norton AntiVirus (well, not the blanking, just the message blocking). It's Plesk's AntiSpam function acting up.

Either you removed the spamassasin package from your server, or something got misconfigured. Plesk tries to parse the e-mails to a scanner it can't find (or something along those lines) and gets blanked e-mails in return.

After submitting this to tech support, I received the following response:


------------------------
Dear Customer,
I was able to resolve this problem for user@domain.com by removing the first line from /var/qmail/mailnames/domain.com/user/.qmail.

Where it used to read:

| if [ -z "$SA" ]; then export SA=1; /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-spamc -f -u
user@domain.com -U /tmp/spamd_full.sock > spamcheck$$; /var/qmail/bin/qmail-local "$USER" "$HOME" "$LOCAL" "" "" "$HOST"
"$SENDER" "$DEFAULT" < spamcheck$$; retval=$?; rm -f spamch eck$$; [ $retval = 0 ] && exit 99; exit $?; fi
| true
/Maildir/

It now reads:

| true
/Maildir/


I've noticed several changes have been made to the spam filtering programs. At this point we won't be able to help you resolve its setup, but the above method should ensure that the SPAM programs are no longer in the E-Mail loop.

Thank you
------------------------


So, in short, either delete the top-most line, or, re-setup the e-mail account in Plesk (but I assume this could take a while on many e-mail accounts).

I have checked the .qmail file on emails that this is happening to and they read.

-------
| true
./Maildir/
-------
The error still persists.

On all of our plesk servers plesk's spam would have been removed when upgraded to 7.02 from 7.0. But it is not supported by the license key.
Anyways I thought I should let you know this problem persists on mail folders with the above setting and does not seem to be going through any spam filters (only from seeing the .qmail file configuration).

I do know for a fact that many of the clients that are having these problems are running norton internet security as this has become pretty mainstream now. I will defiantly put that to the test right away, thanks for the advice.

If anyone else runs into this problem and know any other fixes please let us know.

Yes, Norton AntiVirus is what causes Outlook not to receive the e-mails. It has nothing to do with blanking them, though. (If you leave outlook out of it, only webmail/telnet and send yourself mail, you'll see they still get blanked).

Try re-creating the e-mail account and see if the problem persists.

4PSA's SpamGuardian application now has a feature that drops 'broken' e-mails. Just in case you're interested

I have recreated the email accounts and the problem still continues to persist. I also asked a few people to shut down their Norton AV and Internet Security (which of course they were VERY unhappy and reluctant about doing), and I was told that was not the problem.
However I would like to check and verify this for myself as many of the people that call, leave me baffled as to how they figured out to turn their computer on in the first place.

Redah, could you please be more specific on how to duplicate this error.

Ps. I am still puzzled as to why I have never received one of these messages and had it happen my own email accounts (and I do run Norton IS and AV).

The way the error occured to me was enabling spam-parsing in PSA, and then removing the spamassassin rpm packages.

PSA tried to parse stuff through something that wasn't there, and all the e-mails got blanked.

I think you have misunderstood.
Not ALL messages are being blanked, only a very select few. All regular email is going to all of these accounts with no problem, except for when one of these messages comes along and locks up that account. Even when one of these messages is in the account it still receives email fine, the user just can not access (download) their email until the problem message is zapped from the server.

Does anyone have some kind of fix for this? I have tried everything and it is absolutely killing us.

I am also having this exact problem and I will attest to the fact that it has NOTHING to do with Outlook or NAV. The emails we are receiving that the guys are talking about above are blank emails with a non-breaking space



as the sender, which Outlook crashes on (meaning it won't download the emails from the server). So, like everyone mentioned above, we have to go into our webmail and manually delete these messages. It makes checking email an extreme annoyance.

I have no idea how to prevent this but now that I have finally found this thread I think it would be very useful if we could all compare further notes. Gravity, might you have an instant messenger or something that we might be able to compare some notes? If not, we can keep plugging away at this problem here.

FYI - I have Plesk 6 and Spamassassin.

I just sent this message to EV1's staff. Hopefully someone from there can help us figure out the problem. Let's cross our fingers.

And the non-encouraging email from our friends at EV1Servers.net.




Any suggestions with what I can tell them other than my message below?

And their latest message which doesn't help us at all ...



How would I prevent this from happening? I can't control what kind of crap these frikking spammers send. What a load of @#!@#!@#!@#!.

I have the rpm of spamassassin installed, however it is not enabled. Plus none of our keys support spamassassin.

There is almost no options, and what I really can’t believe is only a few people are having this problem. However this IS happening on almost every plesk system we have (the only ones it is not happening to are a few we have dedicated to some busy sites).

If this is a form of spam we really have no way to block it as sibertron stated.

Again if anyone has any information it is GREATLY appreciated. We have been plagued with this error for much too long.

Are you guys contacting EV1? Please submit trouble tickets ... They are saying that there is nothing that can be done.

Their latest response ...



And my response to them about this, after they closed yet another trouble ticket of mine.

Ev1 is 100% correct, this is issue cant be fixed by them because its a plesk problem. To make things worse it only seams to effect redhat/plesk servers, my suse/plesk boxes dont have this problem.

Then they still need to resolve it because it is a product they are providing to paying customers. Which brings me to my next statement ...

EV1 just sent me a message stating that they send this problem to Plesk. This is the kind of approach to this problem for which I have been hoping. Keep your fingers crossed everyone!

Grab a book as plesk has know about this issue for some time now with no fix in sight.

Guys, don't hold your breath but I might have stumbled upon a fix just out of dumb luck.
I was running top the other day and I seen spamd pop into the process list, I figured that was funny so I looked into it further.
Now I don't know about you guys, but I would like to confirm this with others having this problem. When we installed plesk we were kind of hasty in the fact that we just went ahead and “rpm –Uhv *” everything including the ops and third party directories.
Now our thinking on this was simply upgradeability. If we needed any of these extra features in the future all we needed to do was update the plesk key and we would be able to enable these services.

Now with that said on all of our systems we have a basic plesk key that does not support Spam Assassin. To my surprise when spam assassin was installed it ads itself to startup, also another surprise and I can’t believe that I overlooked this on all of our plesk servers, if I go into services management I can enable Spam Assassin! In fact I was looking more to the fact to disable it because it is running.

So far so good, just wanted to let others know about this and see if it helps them out. My streak could simply be just pure luck that I have not had any “new” emails of this sort come to the plesk servers. I can of course easily duplicate the problem if I just drop a file into my maildir but I think it was spam assassin that was blanking these messages somehow.

Anyways guys keep me in the loop and give me some feedback, this could just be some small flaw I discovered and may not fix the problem at all.

I discovered that if I disabled Norton Anti-Virus's scan email feature when downloading emails it would download all of the messages in Outlook. While this is NOT ideal, I still have Norton running in the background for everyday operations, just not scanning email. I don't use the preview feature in Outlook and I send all emails with attachments to a SPAM folder so I should be good to go.

Man, what has become of email???

Well guys ... I hate to say it ... but I solved this problem by turning off Norton's scan of incoming emails. No problems now ...