WHD incoming mail account error

Question

Hi Everyone.

Our WHD has picked up a strange issue. First the mailbox would not sync since friday last week (though the green dots showed next to inbound and outbound accounts and everything else seemed fine..), and no tickets was showing in WHD. The mail account itself was fine, we could login with owa and see there were tickets coming in, but they were not processed by WHD. Mail account wasnt disabled, locked, mailbox full or anything like that.

Fiddled around a bit in WHD settings and it started working again, but now we are receiving the mail below, one each minute... has anyone seen this before? We run Exchange 2010 SP3 CU20, SQL Server 2014 and the WHD server is installed on a Server 2016 (1607) machine.

Unable to connect to the Incoming Mail Account 'xxx@xxx.com' due to the following error:

"Error processing mailbox messages: Illegal character entity: expansion character (code 0xb 
 at [row,col {unknown-source}]: [1021,128]"

Any help would be appreciated!

fluffy_midnight · Answer

Hi maitadmin​ and comtcjm​,

There're many characters within the help desk that can't be processed because of the way the database has been configured.

You can get around the issue by changing database settings on the relevant fields and tables (specifically to use Unicode or your preferred language encoding) which would resolve your issue, however this isn't a supported change and should only be made by database analysts.

-Midnight

maitadmin · Answer

Thank you Chris

this was exactly the issue. Opened a support call and a support guy called Jerico troubleshooted with me and found this to be the issue.

Hope this helps someone in future.

cheers

percyplant · Answer

I've this same problem, it turned out to be a character within 1 email what the WHD couldn't process. It was then holding up the other incoming emails. I used outlook to open the suspected  email, removed the offending character, saved it then the WHD continue to function correctly.

The character in the email looked like this (a question mark in a box):

Yours might be slightly different character, but that's the problem..

regards

Chris