Retrieving emails from a dead server's hard drive

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 5 Jan 2010, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:

> 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?

I recently tested the movement of Maildir files from one server to a new 
server that didn't know they were coming.  I copied them right into the 
Maildir directories (cur & new) and it 'just worked'. Dovecot (the IMAP 
server) saw the mail items and updated the index.

Make sure you have user & group ownership and perms correct of course.

And do backup before doing this just in case it goes south (even though 
mind didn't). You may want to test to a throw away a/c first.

Cheers,

Rob

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