[FALSE ALARM] Possible email loss with gromox-cleaner

ozy

Hello,

So I ran gromox-cleaner service on 04-04-2025 at 16h30, and noticed a couple of days later that I couldn't find some mails.
Today I investigated, and noticed that ALL mails dissapeared from my mailbox between 26-03-2025 and 04-04-2025.
I am find the email logs from that period in my antispam which is frontal to my grommunio server, so I am sure I'm not crazy.
I can also outrule a bad user manipulation, since all mails from that period dissappeared, regardless of the subfolder, including calendar entries that were made in that period.
I've checked another mailbox from the same server, and got the same result. All mails in that period dissapeared.

Looking at the mailbox sizes, indeed they shrinked when I ran gromox-cleaner, but indeed that's expected.

Trying to repair the mailboxes with gromox-mbck didn't help.

As you can imagine, I'm pretty concerned about that problem, but I don't want to outrule some non-grommunio reason.

I still have backups of that server prior to running gromox-cleaner, so I'm pretty sure I can replay the problem if needed.

So I have two questions:

Can people confirm they use gromox-cleaner, and didn't loose any emails ?
Is there an easy way to recover the mails lost over that period ? So far I think of restoring the server, connect an outlook client as offline cache, export all mails from that period into a PST and them reimport them on current server. But considering that I have many subfolders and 3 mailboxes, that seems quite long.

@crpb Guess you're using gromox-cleaner the most. Would you mind double checking please ?

My server version at the time of the loss was gromox-2.44.14.ga2892ea-lp156.16.1.x86_64

jengelh

For the record: The gromox-cleaner.service unit is disabled by default.

Hypothesis: Some users have experimented and modified the unit to invoke more destructive actions like emptyfld.

ozy

@jengelh Thank you for your insight.

I know gromox-cleaner is disabled by default. I am raising this here so I can get some feedback, as it's not the first time I ran gromox-cleaner, and never had trouble.
As I said: " I don't want to outrule some non-grommunio reason."

TBH, I even wrote a first draft of gromox-cleaner here before @crpb made a better version than mine 🙂

I executed the gromox-cleaner service after a gromox update and reboot. Perhaps I got an FS problem at the time.
I think the best I can do is restore my grommunio VM from the day before, and replay the same actions.
I'll report back in any case.

I play with it on my own private server of which I'm the only administrator. The gromox-cleaner service file seems vanilla

cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/gromox-cleaner.service
[Unit]
Description=Gromox mailbox cleaner
Requisite=gromox-http.service
After=gromox-http.service

[Service]
# Fallback if EnvironmentFile hasn't got any value
Environment=softdelete_purgetime=30d
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/gromox/gromox.cfg
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/gromox-mbop foreach.here.mb ( purge-softdelete -t ${softdelete_purgetime} -r / ) ( purge-datafiles )
MemoryDenyWriteExecute=yes
PrivateDevices=yes
PrivateNetwork=no
PrivateUsers=no
ProtectControlGroups=yes
ProtectKernelModules=yes
ProtectKernelTunables=yes
SystemCallFilter=@default @file-system @basic-io @system-service
Type=oneshot

Also, a rpm -V gromox didn't return anything changed.
There is no override file for the unit file either.

It's the first time I ever experience email loss since I am hosting my own mails (I begun with zaraf... then kopa...).
I even said in another thread that I never experienced any loss with Grommunio a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, I will report back once I got to replay the actions on my backed up server.

ozy

So I got the final word of what happened.
Grommunio is not to blame here !

A KVM disk-only snapshot wasn't reused after restarting my mail VM (transient domain while moving storage).

@jengelh I am truly sorry for the noise.