OTRS 5 - Unable to fetch email from external accounts

A few weeks back I got a call from a customer who complained that OTRS had been idle for a day without creating any new tickets. After some initial troubleshooting it became clear that OTRS was simply no longer able to retrieve mail.

To get a better understanding of the general health of the system, I fired up the cli and issued the following command:

bin/otrs.Console.pl Maint::Daemon::Summary

The output from that command will provide a list of tasks and their current status. In my case, the task MailAccountFetch was failing on every scheduled iteration.

Since I knew for a fact that there had been a network failure during the day, it was easy enough to connect the dots. The MailAccountFetch task was happily doing its thing but before it could complete the job, the network went down. As a result MailAccountFetch was unable to complete its task and the process never got cleared out.

Trying to execute the job manually threw a warning about a potentially running instance and offered the suggestion of using “–force-pid” to override the check.

That sounded like a plan to me and after issuing the suggested command OTRS started fetching mail again without any further issues. Refer to the attached screenshot below for the complete flow and the result of each command.