Recover data from store folders

[jholder]

That's GOOD! Means it's actually starting. You'l need to change the mysql password because it was in your old config:
Resetting LDAP & MySQL Passwords - Zimbra :: Wiki

[audience]

Originally Posted by mmorse

How 'few users'?
Method 2:
zmlmtpinject -r user@domain.com -s sender@domain.com /opt/zimbra/location/#/#/msg/123-4.msg

Injecting a whole folder of files would be:
zmlmtpinject -r user@example.com -s sender@domain.com -d /opt/zimbra/location/#/#/

I have the same problem because of a hdd failure. I could save the most data and wanted to import the mails for just two accounts. Thus I tried method 2 and it said everything worked fine:

LmtpInject Finished
submitted=1189 failed=0
maximum concurrent active connections: 1
113.38s, 95.36ms/msg, 10.49mps
average message zie = 258.21KB

That is the first folder I wanted to import. But there are not 1189 messages in my inbox but just one!
I got the same problem with a second folder. I tried it a couple of times with changing results (up to 90% of the mails) - but I never got all mail.

Any ideas where the problem could be?

[thunder04]

I'm having a similar problem when using zmlmtpinject.

I have a folder of 271 messages (.msg files). zmlmtpinject reports that 271 were submitted and 0 failed, but yet there are only 221 messages in the user's inbox (empty account).

Is there a way to figure out why this is?

[rdlal]

its kind of an old thread, but i'd just like to share with others

on my Zimbra box (see version details on tag), method #1 worked like a charm. although it shows a -d option, when i first tried to use it i got many Java exception errors..

so.. since the user just wanted the mail, regardless if it has the correct date or not, i just ran the command clean, without any args... and it recovered with the correct dates, headers,...

what's strange tho, is the fact that the user deleted some messages on like a 5 days period on the web interface, but they were just removed from the database.. as surprised as i could be (i was already restoring the backup..), i found the messages on the store folder !! ok, it was a pain to find them, lots of less and cat and grep but i eventually found it. marked the first one and last one, selected it, copied to another folder (for safety), and imported into one of my test accounts. after finding out it worked perfectly... you know the rest

thanks MMorse... last time we had to do it, we went through the worst possible way: digging inside SQL and what not.. give me the creeps just reminding of it..

[Oded Arbel]

I had a similar problem, where my EC2 instance running zimbra died and could not be recovered. The /opt/zimbra were not backed up, but all the email was stored on EBS volumes.

Once I reinstalled the server and attached the EBS volumes to it, I was able to access the mail store folder and recovery all the messages using mmorse's Method 1.

I've wrote this simple script to automate recovery - it looks in each "user folder" in the store and scans the message to determine the correct user account by looking for the "delivered for" header in the email. It then runs the recovery procedure on each folder in the user folder automatically:

archive_path=/srv/mail-volume-1/messages-old2; (cd $archive_path/0; for dir in *; do (cd $dir/msg; find . -type f | while read file; do (if file $file | grep gzip; then gunzip < $file; else cat $file; fi) | fgrep 'for <'; done) | perl -nle 'm|for <([^>\s]+)>| and $for{$1}++; END { for $name (sort { $for{$b} <=> $for{$a} } keys %for) { print "'$dir' $name"; last; } }'; done | sed -u -e 's/someuser@somedomain/somotheruser@somedomain/' | while read id name; do (echo "selectmailbox $name"; echo "createfolder /Recovery"; for p in $(ls $id/msg); do echo "addMessage /Recovery $archive_path/0/$id/msg/$p"; done; echo "quit") | su - zimbra -c 'zmmailbox -zadmin'; done)

Note the 'sed' command in the middle there - the detection part will fail to correctly detect the account name if an account is mostly used for receiving email to an alias or using forwards. If that is the case, you can use the sed command to replace the incorrect account name with the correct account name.

If you ever use this script, you should monitor the running process because it will not stop if an error is encountered. In such a case it will fail to recover all email in the folder where it encountered the error, that was not recovered before the error occurred. When such a thing happens (and it does quite often), you will need to go in manually and recover all the lost messages 1-by-1 by hand.