Confirmation on Journal Mailbox Items Deletions

[Bruce_Cranksh1]

Hi All

I have a customer on EV 9 sp2.

One of there Journal Mailboxes has about 120,000 items in an Archive Pending state that is taking forever to process

There  are no items in the J1 or J2  queue so the items must have  been stored but the Post Processing must have failed for some reason to actually remove the item from the Journal Mailbox

Can the customer just delete these Archive Pending items from the Journal Mailbox as they have been stored based on the MSMQ empty queues?

[GertjanA]

Hi Bruce,

IMHO, safest way is to create a new Journal Mailbox, new Journal Archiving task, and a then use that new Journal Mailbox.

Have the old task running, let it clear out the pending archiving items.

If they are not moving at all, same procedure as above, then try to find some of the pending archiving items in the journal archive. If they are there, I think it is up to the customer to decide if he wants to run the risk of not having everything in the archive.

What I would do is new mailbox, new task, change target journalmbx in exchange to the new mailbox.

Keep both tasks running, verify in the old mailbox that the items are processed. If they are not, I would check the Journal Archiving policy, to see if they have set the 'Pending Shortcut Timeout' to 0. If not, change it, sync the offending mailbox. Then run the task for the old journalmailbox in reportmode, and verify the items change back to normal icons. When they are all changed, restart the task in normal mode, and let the mailbox be archived.

Verify it is emptied.

[GertjanA · Accepted solution]

Hi Bruce,

You are correct about the queues. In that perspective, it should be safe to remove the items from the mailbox.

What I would do (data loss and all, especially seeing it is a Journal Mailbox) is stop the task, and then use DocMessageClass to revert the 'pending archiving' icon back to a normal icon (ie change the messageclass back to IPM.Note)

Then start the task again, and have it archive the items (perhaps again). Better safe than sorry.

 http://www.plustech.co.uk/Products/downloads/DocMessageClass.zip

 

[LCT]

Hey Bruce,

When an item has been archived and been pushed throught to the A5 or A3 and then through to to the Storage Archive queue then gets indexed by the indexing service, in your case it will be the J2 queue then the storage archive queue and get indexed by the indexing service. Technically it is now archived and you should be able to find that item in the archive via an archive search process. You can now delete the pending items or do whatever you want with the pending items. Remember, the pending items are for safety until the items has been backed up in EV etc, so it is not a good idea to delete them or move etc. as recommended when you open the pending items. Deleting pending items will cause a problem to post-processing, regardless of journal or mailbox archiving so it is not a good idea.

My advised is to perform a cancel operation on thsoe pending items, restart the journal task and let the task re-process those items. I know it is a painful process it works in the past for me. It is possible that some items are corrupted in the mailbox therefore causing the task not able to process them, just need to determine if there are any and then remove from the inbox.  

[LCT]

Didn't know about that application either...it's good to know. Thanks Gert.

[Bruce_Cranksh1]

Thanks Gert, I didn't know about that application :)

@ LCT

Thanks for the input, very helpful

[GertjanA]

Especially for lots of items in a mailbox, very handy! Better than doing a 'cancel operation' on 120000 items manually....

[LCT]

Indeed....I never had to cancel that many items but I now I know a way around it :) cheers.

[Bruce_Cranksh1]

Hi Gert

Thanks for the response. Some additional information

1. Running the task in Report Mode didn't reverse the archive pending items
2. The customer has created another Journal Mailbox for active data that is working fine  so this Journal mailbox is only for "old data" that is in Archive Pending 

I guess my question is more around the technical workings of MSMQ and EV. If an item is in Archive Pending then it has been to the J2 queue. Once the item is backed up it is moved to the J1 queue for Post Processing and this queue is also empty so I can't see how there could be data loss (which is always a concern :) )

I may be missing something?

[JesusWept3]

Just gonna add my 2 cents in here
Do a spot check in the search before deleting them because what will happen BEFORE it goes to the J2 is its turned in to a pending part, meaning that its going to wait X amount of minutes before turning it in to a pending item....then after that time has passed, it will turn it in to an actual pending item, push it to J2 then Storage Archive then to J1 to delete it.

Did you check the message class to see if it was actually a pending item or a part pending item?
if it was part pending then just deleting those items would mean dataloss as EV would definitely not have stored them.... if they were pending , you should check to see if you can find them in the indexes or not....it is possible for an item to be in a pending state but never have reached the J2 Queue (or A2 queue in mailbox archiving)

[Bruce_Cranksh1]

@ Jesuswept

Makes sense, I'll do those checks. Thanks  for the comprehensive input, its always informative and helpful:)