9.1- This file cannot verify - database or database element is corrupt

[cyberspace]

Hi,

I have been having a little difficulty the last two days with backup being reported as failed because of what seems to be one corrupt email.

The exact message is (i've altered the server name and username):

WARNING: "\\Server\Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes\Joe Bloggs[joebloggs]?Top of Information Store?Inbox?general inbox????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Undeliverable Mail" is a corrupt file.
This file cannot verify.
Database or database element is corrupt

I have tried to hunt down the offending mail in the relevant folder on the server, but seemingly I can't see it...certainly couldn't see any of the above symbols, including any ?symbols.

Is there any way I can exclude this from future mail, or can any of you give me some advice as to how to overcome; I may afterall not be correct in my diagnosis.

Many thanks

 

[Zoplax]

I'm having a similar issue.

You could ask the user to go through their mail and delete the offending message from their Inbox. Or, alternatively, you could also deselect it from the backup (the selection list will let you select down to the message level so that you can pick and choose individual messages to not back up), but I think it would be best to just eliminate it.

If you still have problems after that, maybe investigate this article depending on what version of Exchange you use:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/tips/defragmentation.asp

 

[cyberspace]

I tried to locate the individual message in the job log but when i clicked on where it says "click here to locate this in the log" it told me what the email subject was but there was no options (at least I could not see any) for eliminating the email from future jobs.

I have got back to working on the issue today (member of staff was away and didn't want to interfere with their email!) and all I have done is search on the server under the mailbox path for all messages containing text "undeliverable mail" and deleted them, as none of them had any seeming relevance.

Many of them are very old indeed, and looking back at job logs from quite a while ago there was mention of the offendiing email

The funny thing is it will back up fine some days, and not the next.

What made it worse is that the job log showed the email subject to be containing many chinese looking symbols and other such funny symbols, so when trying to search for those, the server obviously doesn't recognise them, and automatically turns the seach string into a series of | type symbols (but shorter and fatter) which produce no meaningful results!

So I guess I will see on Monday moring!

 

[cyberspace]

Well it did work, so thats great!

Thanks for your post Zoplax

 

[jcasetnl]

That's very odd. I'm getting the same error, chinese characters and all. Tonight I think I'm going to try the ntbackup of the information store (per the backup exec article suggestion) and see what comes of that.

I've also thought of having the user move all items in the folder where the corrupt message resides to a temp folder. Then I'll manually clear out all objects in the sent directory on the exchange server. Any thoughts on that?

 

[cyberspace]

That's what I was going to do.

As i mentioned previously, In with all the chinese symbol garbage, there was "undelieverable mail"

so, i simply navigated to the directory within exchange, searched for all mails containing "undeliverable", told the user the problem, who had a quick look...and then deleted them all since none were needed/important.

I guess it was just lucky that those were the circumstances, I would have hated to have to trudge through hundreds of important emails!

 

[jcasetnl]

Thanks for the information. I'm unfortunately on the garbage end of that scenario, then. The subject in the offending email is one the person uses all the time and she has 600+ emails with similar subjects...

I'll have to look into other options. I think maybe I'll export the entire mailbox on the user's machine then delete and recreate the mailbox on the server.

 

[cyberspace]

Yes, that's what I would do in the same situation.

Unless of course somebody can clarify how to exclude the offending messages from the backup altogether?

 

[jcasetnl]

I ended up doing exactly that - backing up the user's mail and recreating the inbox. That seems to have corrected it. Fun stuff.