Hi all & thanks Aki for adding me to the list.
First of all, I'm not a dovecot user yet. For several years now I use cyrus imapd and never saw the urge to switch, until I recently lost random mails from my mailbox which were neither temporally connected nor related in some other way.
Fortunately, I had a rolling replication which never expunges, so I was able to restore them. While circumventing some pitfalls during the restore, I learned that the backup and restore procedure cyrus imapd offers is deprecated and will be removed.
Now I ponder whether or not I should switch the mda.
Does dovecot offer the following?
- setting up a rolling replication which replicates every action made to the mailbox (flags, mark as deleted, relocations, etc.) to a different server (one way only)
- NOT expunging the emails that have been marked as deleted on the slave server or expunging only manually
- restoring selected emails from the slave directly to the master
The slave server doesn't need to be accessible via imap, I'd be happy to search for some header data (subject, recipient, sender, date, ...) and restore the email by command line using its uuid or message-id or something like that.
Browsing the documentation I found "doveadm-backup" which is using "dsync", but I'm not sure whether or not it fits my requirements.
I'd love to hear your opinions.
Kind regards,
Philippe