filter - Discarding message with Message-ID...

[Baylink]

I'm getting that message in my mailbox.log when a message comes in ... to authenticate my domain renewal, and it expires tomorrow. (Yes, just that one message from that one source at my domain registrar; otherwise it's working fine.)

Nothing I try seems to put me where Zimbra (8.6.0_GA_1153 (build 20141215151110), baremetal on a Linode VPN, CentOS 7.9) will tell me *which filter* is dropping that message, and I have 100+. I used zmprov aal to add logging for lmtp and filter, both at DEBUG and filter at TRACE, but it still staunchly refuses to log which filter is the problem. I get a couple more messages, but nothing with the actual detail -- hope that's fixed in later releases.

Is there some way that I'm missing to learn which filter is telling filter (or lmtp; it's not clear to me) to drop that message?

This is the first time in almost a decade I've needed to monkey with anything, and yes, I probably need to upgrade to 9 or 10, but that's a major undertaking, even for 3 users (and I know that cause I started off with 5.x .

[JDunphy]

Don't know if you tried (from very old forum post) but answering this with sieve in mind or whatever they are using.

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log4j.logger.zimbra.filter=DEBUG

For recent versions, there is this link: https://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Log4j2 which still has filter listed but different syntax.

Provided I am reading the above wiki documentation correctly, it might be this for more modern versions of zimbra.

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  logger.zimbra.name = zimbra.filter
  logger.zimbra.level = DEBUG
 

Never tried it myself but from wiki looks like it might do what you are asking. Another option since user filters are stored in ldap is to either dump the contents to stdout or to dump the specific user via zmprov to stdout.

I add a tag when I create any filter with the same name as the filter so I can tell which fired when I don't see email in folders I expect and want to know how it got there. ... but that strategy would not help with discard.

HTH,

Jim

[Baylink]

I did look at the log4j stuff, but in -- I think it was old AJCody wiki stuff -- it suggested that for 8.6 you should use

zmprov aal

to add the logger for that, and I *did* get more log lines by aal'ing DEBUG and TRACE -- I simply didn't get *filter* to tell me more information, which is the critical item here; that module has no business *not* telling you which user-filter dropped the message; there's no reasonable way to guess, so IMHO it shouldn't even require DEBUG, much less TRACE.

I'll probably go back and try editing it into the log4j config file, though there's a 3-way disagreement on what the syntax ought to be there....

[Baylink]

...And it's a year later, and it's renewal time again, and my Z8 is *still* dropping JUST incoming email from my domain registrar, with this message in mailbox.log:

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2025-08-01 01:33:27,005 INFO  [LmtpServer-75] [ip=45.79.209.44;] lmtp - Delivering message: size=15757 bytes, nrcpts=1, sender=support@tierra.net, msgid=<33988326@prod01.control.tierra.net>
2025-08-01 01:33:27,014 INFO  [LmtpServer-75] [name=jra@baylink.com;mid=3;ip=45.79.209.44;] filter - Discarding message with Message-ID <33988326@prod01.control.tierra.net> from "TierraNet Customer Care" <support@tierra.net>

At least this time, it occurred to me to try this 2 weeks in advance. :-}

Any further ideas about where to learn what is telling the filter daemon to drop that?

[ And hey; maybe the logging I forgot to shut off last year is why the machine can chew up 3GB a week in logging data... :-} ]

[slacker1337]

How many of your 100+ filters use the discard action? You can inspect them using the CLI and extract the relevant information from the output of this command:

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zmprov ga you@domain zimbraMailSieveScript

[liverpoolfcfan]

Any further ideas about where to learn what is telling the filter daemon to drop that?

While it won't provide a direct answer, have you run

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su - zimbra
zmprov ga <your account> zimbraMailSieveScript

This will list all Incoming mail filters for your account with a format of

# Name of filter
if whatever (
Set
of
rules
)

It will be a lot easier to search for the culprit in that listing than going through the Preferences tool.

Edit: Accidentally pasted the Outgoing Sieve key instead of the Incoming one

[Baylink]

Just got this figured out and then looked back here. :-}

Thanks to both of you for the tip, and I'll check that out, but I found confirmation elsewhere that the 'filter' errors are in fact coming from the user-UI configured filters, *and* that you can group select to move to the disable column in that dialog.

So I set the "send me an email" process up all the way to the last click, put *all* my filters in the doghouse, and then sent the mail... and got it. Finished the password reset process (it's my domain registrar; I only have to log into every 5 or 10 years, and it well predated my password safe), and the pushed all the filters back to active. Only missed 3 messages.

CLOSED FIXED.

Does anyone know if those error messages were expanded to include the filter name in anything newer than 8.6?