Recovering deleted messages?

Plutocrat plutocrat at gmail.com
Fri Nov 5 08:36:51 UTC 2021


On 05/11/2021 07.01, Sean McBride wrote:
> But now I have a user who accidentally used a POP client, and it deleted all his email.  He told me this only days later, and it's now been days later still, and so of course he has sent and received email since.  I have backups of course, but it is a feasible thing to 'merge' the deleted emails from the backup into his current mailboxes?

Personally, I'd restore them to another, temporary account set up for the purpose. Then I'd either use

- dovecot sync,
- imapsync, or
- manual drag and drop from one account to the other in Thunderbird

to put the mails back in place, depending on volume of mail involved and personal whim. The Thunderbird route would be easiest for a user to do themselves once set up. However as mail is downloaded from the server to the desktop and then back up to the server, it would take a while if there were lots of messages to deal with.

P.


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