Scan Failed: "Error Code: 256 The mailfile has emails with empty recipients."

Problem

There are some email container files that are unable to be discovered or pre-processed and result in the error listed.  This condition can also affect Collections during the mail file scan verification process.

Error Message

"Error Code: 256 The mailfile has emails with empty recipients."

 Failed: com.teneo.esa.icp.collection.ev.EVContentRetrieverSpec@34b60eb9: [#422295] Unexpected error - [#422295] Unexpected error - [#422305] An error occured while attempting to scan mail file "D:\CW\V714\scratch\temp\esadb\dataStore_evidence_repo_0123456789_abcdef01\EV-temp-0.27.6.1234\MailFiles\0\0.63.1.12345\JOURNALTEST-0.29.6.12345-0.pst","256","The mailfile has emails with empty recipients.",,,,,,,,. PSTScan.exe returned with code 256 The mailfile has emails with empty recipients..

Cause

Some emails do not have any information in the To: field.   This can happen for certain types of internal email correspondents or draft emails.

Solution

1. Change the system wide property "esa.crawler.mailfilescan.detectPSTWithEmptyRecipientIPMNote" with value "false".

The instructions below indicate how to change a property:

a. Navigate to System > Support Features
b. Under "Step 1: Choose a support feature", select Property Browser
c. Under "Step 2: Choose an Appliance", select the server for which you wish to make a change.
d. Select the case (or system), <Make sure this is 'System'>
e. Under "Name of property to change", enter : esa.crawler.mailfilescan.detectPSTWithEmptyRecipientIPMNote
f. Under "New value (leave blank to remove)", enter:  false
g. Check this option, "Confirm change. Are you sure?*"
h. Click Submit (It will provide a confirmation of the change.)
i. Stop and restart Clearwell services. CW Utility Option 3, then 4.

2. Enable the PST files for Processing. (because of the issues they have been set to not enabled)

3. Check Email File Integrity (the expected behavior is the data will change to yellow status: so it is ready for processing)

4. Check the box(es) next to the name of the yellow, unprocessed sources  to index the files. 

IMPORTANT: Be very careful when deciding to set property esa.crawler.mailfilescan.detectPSTWithEmptyRecipientIPMNote to false. This property was introduced by Clearwell to indicate PST files that may have had their email recipient table inadvertently removed by a known issue with PST files exported from Microsoft Exchange 2010 pre-update rollup 3 and then repaired with Windows scanPST.exe. This property was introduced in the changes for ESA-19485 with the accompanying release note:

This feature improves the discovery process by scanning PST files and searching for potentially corrupt PST files which were exported from Exchange 2010 using the New-MailboxExportRequest utility. These types of PST files have a corrupt recipient table, and when repaired by PST Scan, the recipient information is dropped. With V6.6 Fix1, when PST files are scanned, if there are more than 10 emails missing recipient information, then the PST file will fail with an error code indicating that 'The mailfile has emails with empty recipients'. If you encounter this type of PST file, it is strongly recommended that you check if it was exported from Exchange 2010 using the New-MailboxExportRequest utility, and if it was, see if you can export the PST file using another method. If you use ScanPST to repair this email file, then you should open the PST file BEFORE processing it in Clearwell to see if any recipient information exists in the PST file. Note: If this change is triggering false positives, then contact support for system properties to disable this new scanning feature or to increase the email threshold from 10.