On 13/05/2026 22:56 EEST Doug Hardie via dovecot <dovecot@dovecot.org> wrote:
I just migrated my mail server to a new machine. When the new machine was back up and running, I found one mailbox that used to have many emails, now only had 3. I went back to the old machine and found there were only those three messages in the mailbox. I suspect somehow I managed to delete them prior to the backup to the new machine.
I have a copy of that mailbox on a backup machine. I just checked and all are there. They have file names like:
1658299911.M966551P8821.mail,S=5001,W=5108:2,S 1664572476.M701757P94428.mail,S=4051,W=4135:2,Sab 1665119988.M609674P37848.mail,S=8455,W=8629:2,Sab 1665757235.M137163P32739.mail,S=5838,W=5950:2,S 1665774793.M299412P37846.mail,S=4669,W=4755:2,S 1665782571.M706364P40033.mail,S=12191,W=12379:2,S
The backup machine has all the dovecot files for that user. How can I restore those email from the backup machine to the new server?
-- Doug
Looks like maildir, so just putting them back to where they are should work, that is, right folder that ends with new/ or cur/.
Aki