Strange issue downloading emails

[TheCableGuy96]

Hi Guys,

I have something weird going on I can't suss out and need some help please...

I'm not a business and just hosting some personal domains and one is for my mums emails. She said to me last night that her iPad had stopped downloading any emails since Saturday (she uses IMAP on the standard MAIL app with iOS which has always worked great until now).

I had a look and could see she is logging in fine so it's not a firewall issue but nothing new was downloading even though I can see the emails in roundcube on the server and they are also downloading to her iPhone using the same iOS Mail app using IMAP.

I thought maybe something on the iPad has got corrupt and decided to re-install the email account which re-downloaded all emails but instead of stopping at Saturday 24th like they did before, they stopped downloading anything beyond Wednesday 20th this time so further back. So I removed the whole Mail app and rebooted the iPad (hard reboot holding down until you see the Apple logo), reinstalled the app and both email accounts (her work exchange email which is working fine) and again it stopped at Wednesday 20th again.

Scratching my head I checked the email account and could see there are 23k emails in the inbox (around 5-6GB), nothing major I don't think but still pretty large. I thought maybe the inbox is too large and the iPad is struggling. Now she doesn't want to lose any emails so I said I'd create an Archive folder and tell the iPad to Archive them into that folder for future and also move a load into there.

I moved a ton of emails in there, probably 90% leaving just emails since this year in the Inbox. I refreshed the mailbox in the app and it sync'd showing the new folder and emails in it but the Inbox still won't show any emails beyond last Wednesday even though her iPhone does.

I've tried disabling Imunify360 and CSF firewall just in case it's that but that didn't work. I can't see anything in /var/log/messages, /var/log/exim/mainlog and have run out of ideas.

Has anyone any ideas or can help please?

 

[TheCableGuy96]

I have resolved this... It was Imunify360's Malware scanner which falsely identified many emails in her mailbox as malware and deleted them. However, it appears to have just deleted the physical email file rather than both the file and from Dovecots database.

So the email was trying to be displayed and sync'd with her iPad but couldn't because the file didn't exist.

It still worked on her phone because that was constantly sync'ing and had sync'd the malware tagged emails before they were deleted by Imunity360. I have restored the emails and it's working fine again now.

Raised a ticket with imunify360 about the false positives and how it manages them. Very good company so I'm sure they will resolve it fast.