mail recovery question

plisken · 11-25-2004, 01:19 AM

I have recently had a system crash, power related, and I'm in the process of getting it back together, almost there, thanks to be having a good backup which included most of my configuration files.

Good news as I forgot how I managed to configure sendmail, apache etc etc.

Anyway, I have copies of /var/spool/mail and I wish to copy all of each users mail to the current /var/spool/mail folder.

How can this be done, or indeed can it be done?

Thanks in advance...

acid_kewpie · 11-25-2004, 07:57 AM

i don't follow... just copy the files surely... the data will still be valid.

plisken · 11-25-2004, 11:34 AM

I'm concerned as some users have since received new mail and not yet retrieved it, so if I copy then it will overwrite any mail currently there...

I suppose I'm looking for some form of merge or something...

hob · 11-27-2004, 01:11 PM

You can merge standard mailbox files by using >>

This redirect appends the output to the target file, rather than overwriting the entire contents of the file.
e.g

cat /oldmail/bob >> /var/spool/mail/bob

You can use this in a script to do the whole set of current mailboxes.

If you are going to append stuff to a full set of live mailboxes it's a good idea to schedule downtime and stop the SMTP, POP and IMAP services first so that no mail goes in or out of the boxes whilst you are running the script.

outlook · 11-07-2005, 08:12 AM

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