Failed access to webmail, Roundcube disables itself?

[vvenet]

Dear support team,

Just recently I found out that I can not access webmail through a web browser. In the past I could.
Then I saw that in the control panel that webmail was disabled (see pic1 and pic2). I enabled webmail for all e-mail addresses in my account and thought all would be fine (see pic3 and pic4).
Today however I could not access webmail again. When checking the settings in the control panel, I saw that webmail settings had disappeared again and that webmail had been disables again (automatically?) (pic1 and pic2).
I again enabled webmail for all e-mail adresses (pic3 and pic4).

Questions:
1) why is webmail/Roundcube disabled? Is it because of a bug or is it done automatically?
2) I use webmail, so how to enable it permanently for the e-mail addresses setup in my account?

I searches the forum but I could not find answers to my questions.
Your help and assistance is appreciated very much. Thank you and kind regards. 🙂 

[wolstech]

We did a bulk-disable of webmail on all accounts recently because it was determined that webmail was responsible for PHP not working properly on our servers, 503 errors, and long Apache restart times due to wasted vhosts. Accounts also no longer come with webmail by default. The majority of our users don't use it. Disabling webmail for everyone was one of the many things done as part of this maintenance: https://helionet.org/index/topic/64578-johnny-maintenance/

That said, this was a one-time process and it should not remove itself repeatedly. If you turn it back on, it should stay enabled going forward. Turning it back on does require you wait 2 hours for an Apache restart before it will work again.

Is it disabling itself again after you turn it back on?

[vvenet]

Dear Wolstech, thank you for your quick reply and clear explanation. 
Sorry for being the (maybe) only person on your platform who is actually using the webmail feature.
To answer your question: at the moment it has not disabled itself automatically yet. I will keep track of it. 
Thank you again! 🙂 🙏
 

[wolstech]

No problem   A few others also use it as well and have turned it back on. It's not an issue if its being used. 

The issues we saw were because every single one of the 4000+ domains on the server had it enabled, which meant lots of resources going to webmail subdomains that nobody used, and lots of exposure to bots that wanted to break in and send spam. By turning it off on domains where it's not needed, we save resources (both in terms of Apache vhosts and CPU/RAM use), and also substantially reduce Roundcube's exposure to abusive bots because the webmail subdomains simply show the (static HTML) queued page instead of Roundcube when its disabled.