Restore lost messages from mailbox folder

philip_sz

Hi all,

I lost all my messages from “Sent” folder. I don’t know how (maybe some thunderbird cleanup task).

I have nightly backups of my mailcow instance. Is it possible to restore just the mails from the “Sent” folder?
I saw in my backup script logs that each message seems to be a separat file. Can I just copy the files from my backup into the docker volume? What permissions need the files? Do I have to restore any cache? Should I stop the containers while I am writing to the docker volume?

thank you all!

diekuh

Hi, yes, you can simply copy them back to .Sent/cur

The permissions should be kept as they are in the tar file (owned by 5000:5000 and, I think, mode 400 or 600).

philip_sz

diekuh Thank you!

I restored my files using this docker command:
sudo docker run -it --rm -v mailcowdockerized_vmail-vol-1:/vmail -v /opt/philip-sent:/philip-sent debian:buster-slim

I realized that it is important to preserve the timestamp of the files, so I used cp -a /philip-sent/cur/* .../philip/.Sent/.
Now everything works fine 🙂

P.S.: The permissions are -rw------- (I think it’s 0600)

MAGIC

Should be 600
600 -rw------- 1 vmail vmail 1982 Apr 20 21:10 1618945893.M173934P310.662c42fb0749,S=2476,W=2548:2,S