Journaling - Extraction Failures

This article contains information on resolving Mimecast journal extraction issues, including handling large or envelope-less items in the journal mailbox, understanding common rejection causes, and steps to report, test, and troubleshoot extraction with Mimecast Support.

In some cases, although Mimecast can connect to the Journal mailbox and authenticate, the actual message extraction may fail due to a message blocking the queue, message age restrictions, or service-related issues.

Explanation

Once you have confirmed that no infrastructure or device changes have been made, or if there are any known issues that may prevent the successful extraction of Journal information between Mimecast and the remote infrastructure, please consider the following:

• Does the Journal mailbox contain large items that might cause a time-out during extraction?
  • Does the Journal mailbox contain any items that do not hold a message envelope (when using Exchange Envelope Journaling)?
  • Is the system time on any source device (for example, an application server that generates email) incorrect, making messages appear older than they really are and causing them to be treated as expired journal items?

When journaling is not functioning correctly, internal emails may not be automatically archived in Mimecast. Messages sent during a period of journaling or extraction failure will not be available in the Mimecast Archive unless they are later recovered via an alternative method, such as email ingestion from the original mail server.

Resolution

If you find messages that might be causing the issue (most likely the oldest items in the mailbox), please move them to a subfolder of the inbox and report this back to Mimecast Support. Mimecast can then test extraction once more and continue extracting messages.

In addition, use the following steps to help resolve extraction or delivery failures:

• Verify that all systems generating journal messages have the correct date and time to prevent messages from appearing older than 30 days.
• Review your environment for any specific sources or file types that consistently fail journaling, as these may need to be excluded, corrected, or handled separately.
• Confirm there are no network connectivity or journal connector configuration issues, and review alternate journaling recipient settings if applicable.
• Contact Mimecast Support with detailed error samples (including timestamps, sender/recipient, and rejection messages).

If journaling has been non-functional for a period and messages are missing from the Mimecast Archive, contact your account manager for assistance.