Recovering email for a single user from backup (Community Edition)

[OverZealous]

I have a user who has had all of her email spontaneously disappear. I think it is caused by Thunderbird, because the logs show what looks like manual deletion of every message. (I truly don't believe that she would have deleted them herself.)

I still need to figure out what is happening, but I also want to try and recover the emails. I have nightly backups (created using the Shutdown / LV / copy method). However, those were really only intended for disaster recovery. I don't have an extra server to set Zimbra up on.

Is there any practical way to extract messages out of a complete Zimbra backup without installing it? For example, by setting up just a MySQL server and extracting the messages from the DB (if they're stored in the DB).

Barring that, I could attempt to recover it on a VM on my desktop, but that is an awful lot of work!

I'm running 5.0.16 FOSS.

[OverZealous]

Quick update, it turns out she had checked the "Delete messages older than 60 days" option. So, at least I now know what caused it! (I don't use Thunderbird myself.)