Overview
You are receiving email notifications that there are a number of emails that failed to be processed by GFI MailEssentials. Navigating to the stated folder directory you notice that there are a lot of files, some very old. Why are these emails failing and how to process these emails?
Information
Based on our documentation, GFI MailEssentials scans emails for spam, viruses, trojans, and other malware. If a failure occurs when an email is processed by the anti-virus/trojan/content modules, the email is not delivered to the recipient as it may contain insecure content.
If a failure occurs when an email is processed by the anti-spam modules, which are executed after successful checks by the anti-virus/trojan/content modules, the email is sent to the recipient as it has already been successfully verified for malicious content.
Emails that are found in the \GFI\MailEssentials\EmailSecurity\FailedMails are caused by one of the Email Security modules that has failed to process the messages. This usually happens when the engine fails to update.
To determine what engine failed to update, Open the MailEssentials Configuration GUI and follow the steps below:
- For the Virus Scanning Engines:
- Navigate to Email Security > Virus Scanning Engines
- Select each of the licensed engines
- Open the Updates tab
- The Update Status section will indicate if the updates are failing
If any virus scanning engine update is failing, follow the solution in the "Manual Update Process for the Virus Scanning Engines" article.
- For the Trojan & Executable Scanner:
- Navigate to Email Security > Trojan & Executable Scanner
- Open the Updates tab
- The Update Status section will indicate if the updates are failing
- For the Email Exploit Engine:
- Navigate to Email Security > Email Exploit Engine
- Open the Updates tab
- The Update Status section will indicate if the updates are failing
If the Trojan & Executable Scanner or the Email Exploit Engine updates are failing, follow the solution in the "Manually Updating Trojan & Executable Scanner and Email Exploit Engine" article.
To reprocess these messages you need to follow the steps detailed in this support article: Reprocessing Emails Wrongly Moved to the FailedMails Folder.
These emails are not blocked but rather they have failed to be processed and can be deleted at your discretion. You may open the .txt files with any text editor, or rename them to .eml (For example, the email1.txt file must be renamed to email1.eml) and open them with Outlook or any similar application to view their content.
Please exercise care when opening .eml files, as they may contain malicious attachments.
If you are unable to reprocess failed emails or want to discover the root cause, please generate the troubleshooting logs as follows:
- Make sure that you have tracing enabled.
- Reproduce the issue by following the steps to reprocess the emails as mentioned above or wait for another message to fail.
- Run the troubleshooter:
- Start > Programs > GFI MailEssentials > Troubleshooter
- Follow the Log Generation Wizard for collecting the required and pertinent information.
- Select New Case when completing the log generation to attach the logs to a new case that will be automatically created, or open a support ticket manually and attach the logs to that ticket, so that the Support team can investigate the problem.