Recovering deleted mailbox

[Aki Tuomi]

> On 28/04/2022 01:57 Shawn Heisey <elyograg at elyograg.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> On 4/27/22 16:18, Sean McBride wrote:
> > I have a user (coworker) that accidentally deleted a mailbox and all its sub-mailboxes.
> >
> > I use Maildir format storage.  I have backups.
> >
> > Is it enough to put the mailbox folder back where it was?  I'm talking about the folder that contains 'cur', 'new', 'tmp', 'dovecot-uidlist', etc.   Or would this desynchronize or otherwise confuse dovecot?  Or is it preferable to use some doveadm command?  Or...?
> 
> 
> Disclaimer:  I am not affiliated with the project, and I am definitely 
> not an expert.  I've been running dovecot for my personal mail server 
> for a long time, thankfully with very few incidents.  I have done some 
> manual surgery on my maildir mailbox and seen how it reacts.  Dovecot is 
> very resilient.
> 
> What you describe should be sufficient.  It's how I would proceed with a 
> restore.  In most cases I would copy the backup on top of any existing 
> structure, rather than doing a wholesale replace, because any new mail 
> received should have different filenames than what is in the backup.
> 
> If it were me, I would probably delete all the files that have a 
> filename starting with "dovecot" in that user's mailbox, and restart 
> dovecot, letting dovecot rebuild those files when the user connects.  I 
> don't really have any experience with how things operate over POP3, I've 
> always used IMAP with dovecot.
> 
> I'm interested to know whether the real experts here have different 
> advice than this, in case I ever find myself in that situation.  There 
> might be some doveadm commands that accomplish the dovecot* file 
> rebuilding in a cleaner way.
> 
> Thanks,
> Shawn

There is no reason to delete the dovecot files after recovery. You can run `doveadm force-resync` to ensure everything is synced. Removing the files just cause more problems than benefit usually.

Aki