This, too, should probably have a wiki entry. In dbmail, deleting a message and it being removed from the database is a 3 step process. 1) When you "delete" a message with your mail client, it simply updates the message status in the database. 2) At some later time dbmail-util is run to change from a "deleted" status to a "go ahead and remove from the database" status. 3) At a subsequent run of dbmail-util, those last messages are actually removed from the database.
So, how to recover an accidentally deleted message depends on where you're at in that process. In either setup 1 or 2, you can simply update the dbmail_messages entry to set the status back to 0 or 1. Yes, it's normally that simple. After step 3 has taken place, the message is gone from the database and you'd have to restore it from an external source. You can backup an entire database using something like mysqldump, but that's not as well suited for restoring individual mailboxes. For that purpose, you can periodically export mailboxes in mbox format (there's a tool for that, maybe dbmail-export? or maybe dbmail-util again?). Restoring a message from an mbox file would be fairly similar to restoring a Maildir, it's just all mail in one file vs. one message per file .. there are tools to make it simple to process mbox files, or you can probably manage pretty easily with just a plain text editor, too (unless the mbox is really large or something). Get your message(s) you want to restore, then feed then into dbmail-smtp to re-inject them back into the database. You can specify the user and mailbox to put it in. > We use for now Courier-IMAP because for us it's easy to restore deleted > mail from our backups into the home Maildir. How can we do that with > DBmail ? -- Jesse Norell - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kentec Communications, Inc.
