Pending items not been changed to "processed" after backup

[Shane_Seagreen_]

Hi,

I have a user who has quite a lot of mail that is in pending state, and will not seem to convert to a fully fledged shortcut after a backup has occurred. I have attempted to "zap"her mailbox, and re-enable it, but this seems to have made no difference. I rebuilt the indexes, and again (as expected), no effect. The main problem for the user is that these pending items cannot be forwarded on to other recipients (which in itself I find a little strange).

Anyone have any ideas that may sort her mailbox out?

[#2]

Shane

Maybe your backup is not clearing the 'A' archive bit from the archive (vault store) partition? Check that with attrib on the directory.

The fact that you are unable to forward pending items could point to a bigger problem. Is the user able to forward normal, unarchived mail?

Have you verified that the message have been archived by viewing them with Archive Explorer or the search.asp page?

Is this error only affecting the one user?

[Lee_Allison]

Shane, been a while since I've looked at this but a 'pending' item should not be able to be moved, forwarded, or anything until the Vault is done with it. The message is stuck there until Vault either reverts it or converts it to a shortcut.

Check what Joe mentioned about the "A" bit on the files.

Also, if a customer absolutely needs to forward something they should be able to go to Tools | Enterprise Vault | Cancel and revert it back to a real mail message.

[Shane_Seagreen_]

Further investigation reveals that a bunch of users have been affected by this, and for a specific time frame too (first 3 weeks of April), all items after this have been archived successfully per our policy. Bit of a strange one, I have logged a call, but I suspect unmarking the item, and letting the vault take it's natural course will be the way forward.

[Micah_Wyenn]

what's your safety copy setting at?

micah

[Shane_Seagreen_]

the same as it was when the software was installed 4 months ago, "After backup".

[Micah_Wyenn]

Until you resolve your archive bit problem, you might want to change safety copies to remove immediately after archive. That should clear the pending items and give your users back the functionality they need on their email messages. You can set that setting back (if you choose) once that's done and the "heat" is off your back.

micah

[Shane_Seagreen_]

I had a response from symantec on how to fix this. It seems moving users before items are fully archived has caused the problem.

[Shane_Seagreen_]

The solution given was:

Within the Mailbox Policy on the Enterprise Vault (EV) server for versions 6 and up

Open the VAC and browse to the Site,Policies, Exchange, Mailbox section and right click on the Mailbox Policy. On the Advanced Tab, ensure you are viewing the Archiving General settings and change the Pending Shortcut Timeout value to 0. Once you set this registry value, you will need to open the VAC and right click to select Run Now on the Archiving Service/Task, select Report mode, and select the mailbox or mailboxes against which you wish to run the registry key functionality.
Reset this value back to it's original state once this is finished.

[Lee_Allison]

They told you to do what you already knew to do. Setting the PendingShortcutTimeout to zero basically means that on the next archive run anything that didn't already convert will get REverted back to a normal piece of mail. Then on the ensuing archive run those items will get picked up like normal.

But at least you got a good root cause, moving the mailboxes. Cool.