Emails showing up in my 'Trash' folder on Lotus Notes

Question

I use Lotus Notes 8.5.2FP2 at my job. I have had an ongoing issue with emails showing up in my 'Trash' folder that I have not placed in that folder. After several contacts with the service desks in researching this issue, I have been provided the following explanations:

SUPPORT's FINDINGS: Although there were no Mail Rules visible in my mailbox, support had a peek through the API and found 20 Filter Formulas. These usually are the effect of mail rule documents being deleted without first being disabled.

So in effect, there were 20 enabled mail rules in my mail file which were invisible to the user's eye.

Support has disabled these and now there are no filtering criteria enabled in my mail file.

Since the above fix, I discovered additional occurrences of emails being placed in my 'Trash' folder.

After additional follow-up, below is support's findings: Support has replaced the design on my mail box as they think the problem might be being caused by a corrupted inbox view.

I'm looking for a second opinion on my concerns about these findings:

I have no idea how long this had been occurring since I did not create any mail rules. Any way to find out how long this has been occurring? Any way to find out how many emails were lost due to being placed in my trash? Is it possible to determine how this been occurring? and by whom? If yes, how? Is it possible to determine all emails that were deleted? If yes, how?

Your help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

The issue with deleted mail rules remaining active is well-known in the Lotus Notes support communuity. That explanation sounds very plausible, however you claim that you never created any rules. Are you the sole user of this mail file, or have you delegated access to one or more assistants? Have you, or your company set up any anti-spam products that integrated with Notes' mail rules feature?

The corrupted mailbox design is not impossible, but IMHO is somewhat implausible if it's only ever been happening to some messages rather than all of them. There is one circumstance in which I could believe it: if your mail file is corrupt on clustered Domino server that is configured as a backup, i.e., that server only takes over mail routing when the primary server is down. A more likely explanation IMHO for the problem continuing after rogue mail rules were properly deactivated (assuming that they even were!) is that there are additional replicas of your mailbox (possibly on other servers) that still have those rogue rules in them and the problem will only go away when the rules are cleared on all of them.

Any way to find out how long this has been occurring? If the messages were cleared from the Trash, then not easily.

Any way to find out how many emails were lost due to being placed in my trash? Ditto.

Is it possible to determine how this been occurring? Even harder.

and by whom? If you're asking who done it, even harder still. If you're asking who can determine how it has been occurring, the answer is someone with deep knowledge of Notes and Domino and access to both audit and archive data that may have been created and kept for your mail file might be able, with a very large investment of time (unknown how much, particularly since you don't know how long this has been going on). In most organizations, though, the necessary data will not be available.

If yes, how? See below.

Is it possible to determine all emails that were deleted? Maybe. See below.

If yes, how? Maybe. Very laboriously. See below.

Here's the thing. If your organization has invested in software that audits your Notes and Domino systems and keeps records of all changes on the servers and to data in mail files, and if your organization has enabled mail journaling and keeps the journals either accessible through Notes and Domino or through a third party archiving system, or if your organization keeps daily backups that go back far enough, and someone is willing to invest a huge amount of time reconciling audit records with journals, then theoretically you might get answers to your questions.

I.e., in certain industries mail journaling is common because regulators require it, at least for some employees. Few companies, however, do it unless they are in those industries. Auditing all changes in a Notes/Domino messaging environment is probably even more rare.

Answer 2

I sometimes still have same problem with Notes 9. User deleted mail but wrong mail finished in trash. Unchecking "Show check marks...." allways solve problem.

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