On Oct 6, 2008, at 9:46 PM, Chris Cappuccio wrote:

Is there any way to tell an IMAP client to not synchronize/delete
old mail through IMAP? Let's say that recent events cause a mail spool to
not exist, but people may still want to see old messages that are already
cached on their machines.

IMAP protocol doesn't define anything like this, so it depends on the
client. I think it's unlikely that any support it.

On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 11:46 -0700, Chris Cappuccio wrote:

Is there any way to tell an IMAP client to not synchronize/delete old mail through IMAP? Let's say that recent events cause a mail spool to not exist, but people may still want to see old messages that are already cached on their machines.

This is a client question, and details depend on your particular client. Been there myself before. (Please don't ask where all the users Inbox went.) Possible solutions include

(a) Do NOT start the client, but harvest the local cache. With some luck they do resemble mbox, Maildir or MH, so you can simply re-create the server-side lost messages client-side and copy somewhere else for later importing or re-feeding.

(b) Kick the connection between client and server, start client. You might be able to simply copy the (cached) stuff to local folders, wile there still is no connection to the IMAP server.

Alternatively, starting the client in an offline mode might do the same.

In either case, I suggest getting a copy of the client cache *now* before starting it. So you can start from scratch and harvest the copied cache as per (a), in case some other way failed.

Since you explicitly mentioned "client caches", option (a) likely would be the way to go anyway. You got a cache? Harvest it. That's your best bet. Anything else is just for convenience...

Good luck.

guenther

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