Extracting mail after server failure

[Rudy Gevaert]

Quoting Michael Smith <ms at tribeca.com>, Mon, 21 Oct 2013:

> My mail server suffered multiple hardware failures because of electrical
> problems.
>
> Fortunately I had a backup of the mail store (but not the server config) on
> a disk which I was able to mount and copy to another host.
>
> At this point I'm just trying to export the mail so I can import it into an
> imap client.
>
> Is there a simple way to read the cyrus-imap mail store, or do I need to
> configure a new server?

Hi Michael, years ago I had a similar problem :(.

You can use reconstruct to recreate the mailboxes.db file.  However in  
case of many TB of data this can take too long.  But note the  
following options to reconstruct

        -f     Examine  the  filesystem underneath mailbox, adding all directo-
               ries with a cyrus.header found there as new  mailboxes.   Useful
               for restoring mailboxes from backups.

        -s     Don't stat underlying files.  This makes reconstruct run faster,
               at the expense of not noticing some issues (like zero byte files
               or size mistmatches).  "reconstruct -s" should be quite fast.

In my case, I don't think -s existed then, I used 'find' to get a list  
all the mailboxes and used a script to create the mailboxes.db  
contents as a text file.  I then converted that txt file to the db  
file with one of the tools that comes with cyrus.  (ctl_dbtool).  The  
only catch is that the txt file needs to have a tab at the end of the  
line (or something like that.)

Good luck!

Rudy




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  Rudy Gevaert                             e-mail: Rudy.Gevaert at UGent.be
  Directie ICT, Afdeling Infrastructuur
  Groep Systemen                                      tel: +32 9 264 4750
  Universiteit Gent                                   fax: +32 9 264 4994
  Krijgslaan 281, gebouw S9, 9000 Gent, Belgie               www.UGent.be
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