Retrieving emails from a dead server's hard drive

[Tyler Aviss]

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 9:11 AM, William O'Higgins Witteman
<william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 04:46:59PM -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:
>>>On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 04:30:15PM -0500, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
>>>>One thing that worries me is that the hostnames of the old server and my
>>>>desktop differ, so the filenames in the maildirs, which include the
>>>>hostname, will not be uniform.  I will test, and report back.
>>>
>>>Doesn't matter.  They are just unique names.  They can be anything.
>>
>>Exactly.  Infact it is good that the old hostname is in the filename
>>as is guarantees uniqueness on the new server.
>>
>>In my tests the hostnames (and usernames) were different and it all
>>'just worked' with Dovecot.
>
> I tried copying a few of the files, to test, and as luck would have it,
> they were spam that passed the first round of amavis/spamc, but were
> caught by the second round of razor/bogofilter - so without looking
> closely at the logs they didn't seem to be coming through.
>
> Once I made a backup and copied everything it did, indeed work as you
> all suggested.
>
> I haven't looked for a while, but it looks like my first round of spam
> filtration is blocking between 67%-90% of the emails inbound per day,
> and my procmail-based secondary filter is blocking about 20% of the
> remaining, per day.  Seems like a lot of spam, but it also isn't
> bothering me at all.  I don't like to contemplate life without filters.
> --
>
> yours,
>
> William
>
>

I used to run my own mail setup, but got tired of the endless battle
against SPAM and reconfiguring when the box got moved around a bunch
of times. I eventually moved to using google's (free if you're
not-for-profit) email hosting under my own domain.

I thought my SPAM filtering was pretty good, but theirs is just bloody
amazing.  I maybe see one or two junk mails every few months, and
almost zilch for false positives. I guess they just have more
reports/feedback to compare against, but I wonder what filters they
use and if they're publicly available.
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