Recovering deleted mailbox
Aki Tuomi
aki.tuomi at open-xchange.com
Thu Apr 28 05:27:07 UTC 2022
> 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
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