[SLE] Where might IMAP mail have gone?
SUSE 10.1 For many years, I used KMail directly to/from my ISP. KMail would grab from POP3 server and keep locally. Then I decided that I wanted to be able to access mail from multiple boxes on my home LAN, so I tried fetchmail > Postfix > [Maildir] Dovecot. It took me a while, and for many weeks I had both KMail and fetchmail configured to "keep" or leave the mail on the ISP, so that it would remain available. Finally, I seemed to have it working. I connected from my iBook to the SUSE machine, saw many thousands of messages - all in my Inbox - and began sorting them into folders (matching the folder naming that I'd been using with KMail) creating rules/filters, and all that. Presumably all this was happening on the IMAP (Dovecot) server. So, I finally removed "keep" from the .fetchmailrc, no doubt relieving a burden from my ISP. :-) You know what comes next. I closed down the iBook that evening and came back the next day to finish sorting the thousands of messages... and they weren't there. Mail (the name of the OS X e-mail program )on the iBook connected to Dovecot IMAP on the SUSE box and presented me with... a few hundred messages in total, from today's mail nothing previous. There should have been thousands from the past five or six weeks. After pounding frantically through the Mail interface and finding no hints, I went to the SUSE box and opened KMail, configured it to use a local IMAP account, and was presented with... three messages that had come in since the last ten minutes. Again, I looked in both programs for some horrible setting to "hide anything older than today or that you might have seen before" or worse, "destroy/expunge anything before today". Didn't see it. So I looked through the fetchmail, Postfix and Dovecot configs for similar. Didn't recognize any such. So, does my mail still exist? Between ten and twenty thousand messages from the past month? I looked in what I thought were likely places in my home directory, in my /Data directory, in /var/spool, and anywhere that seemed to have a mention in any of the mail config files. Nothing newer than a month ago, from an experiment I tried then. I can find old MBOX stuff from October of 2002, and a clump of Maildir format messages from March and another clump from May, and nothing else. I'm not concerned about years previous to 2006, because I have CD backups, but what about the recent month or three? Where might it still live? Any particular log files I should look at? Kevin (in a mail vacuum at home) The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com
On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 10:31 -0400, mlist@safenet-inc.com wrote:
I closed down the iBook that evening and came back the next day to finish sorting the thousands of messages... and they weren't there. Mail (the name of the OS X e-mail program )on the iBook connected to Dovecot IMAP on the SUSE box and presented me with... a few hundred messages in total, from today's mail nothing previous. There should have been thousands from the past five or six weeks.
You might want to check the hard disk of OS X, to make sure Mail hasn't downloaded the email and then deleted them from the server You might also want to make sure there aren't any hidden (unsubscribed) folders on the IMAP server. Many email clients will default to a setting of "show only subscribed folders", so if your email has been moved to another folder on the server, they would become "hidden" Unfortunately I've focused on Cyrus IMAP, so I have no idea where dovecot stores its email, so I couldn't tell you where to look for it -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com
participants (2)
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Anders Johansson
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mlist@safenet-inc.com