Retrieving emails from a dead server's hard drive

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 03:22:01PM -0500, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> Just before New Years my server at home suffered a non-recoverable
> hardware failure - perhaps it couldn't bear to face a new year.  The
> motherboard or something closely related to it has "gone wrong".
> 
> That's not the end of the world, or the end of my data.  I used the
> backup from the morning of the event to recreate the machine's functions
> on my desktop, and I'll be restoring the websites over the next few
> days.  It only took a few minutes to set up my mailserver, and mail is
> once again getting delivered.
> 
> Where I would like advice is in the recovery of email.  Some of the
> email users had not checked their mail between the 25th and the 31st,
> and their mail is still sitting on the hard drive from the old server,
> now in an enclosure.  It is in maildir format.  I would like to move it
> to their active account, or redeliver it, but I am not sure how.  Any
> suggestions?

If it is maildir it should be trivial to just move the message files
into place.  The message filename is partially based on the time it
arrived and hence should be unique.

> (For interest's sake, when I could get the machine to POST it beeps,
> launches into the BIOS, and then the screen goes squizzy.)

Lovely.  How does it beep?  The beep codes often tell a lot.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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