I am using Thunderbird as an email client for a POP3 server. Recently, I formatted my hard disk drive to change the OS from Windows XP to Windows 7. Consequently, I lost all my local emails. I also don't remember whether or not I had the server settings "Leave messages on server Until I delete them". Is it possible to retrieve back those old messages ?
Manoj,
You need to contact your email hosting provider to see what's possible on their end. Many don't keep permanent copies of emails. Once a customer downloads the email and deletes it, it is gone. Even if they make daily backups, it's possible that than an email arrived during the day and you downloaded it and deleted it before a backup ever happened.
If these messages are very important to you, you may have some hope of extracting them from your hard drive, depending on how the formatting worked. You can study options for forensics tools or contact a professional data recovery service.
As tripleee said in the comment, all the messages from server were automatically fetched when I set up a new Account. Luckily, it looks like I had the "server settings" to " "Leave messages on server Until I delete them". Thanks tripleee.
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So I have a strange question here, maybe it's impossible but I hope some people are able to guide me on how to do this.
Me and my parents are running a business and are getting over 50 mails a day on 3 different mail boxes, and on a desktop this is fine but they are using tablets too to read these but the problem is that there isn't enough space to save all those mails offline.
So when they need some information from a client they need to go to the online mail panel and search there, but the searching is easier on Outlook than on Roundcube.
Is there a way to setup a local server that will stock all the mails, and when we search for a mail he temporary gets that mail from the server and deletes it after a few minutes from the tablet?
Lets say i install an smtp server but no backend store where emails can be stored. I do not install any imap/pop3 server either.
What would happen to received email?
EDIT : I am talking about emails for virtual users and not local operating system users
Unix/Linux system by default store incoming messages to local email domains in per OS account mailbox-files usually /var/mail/username. Some command line tools (e.g. mail) allow access to "system mailbox (file)"
I'm not 100% sure what the question means...
In a mail/interop context the answer to this is: This is a local matter. A mail (IMAP/SMTP) server has to store mail somewhere when it's received, and it has to read it somewhere when it's accessed (IMAP/POP/JSONthings), but how it's stored is deliberately not specifed. The standards cover how you talk to the servers via the internet. How they talk to their disk is not. Put differently, internet matters are standardised, local matters are left completely up to the software used.
We currently have POP3 mail accounts where I am and try as I might to convince my manager that we should be using hosted IMAP or Exchange he won't budge because of the cost. The staff are mostly out of office so there is no domain server here, however, we do have a dedicated server and I wondered whether I could use this to collect the mail and distribute it from there in some way.
Effectively what I'm trying to do is ensure mail is stored somewhere other than the end users machine because backups are user dependant at the moment. With hosted Exchange or Exchange on this server would be simple but my manager won't shell out for it. I have seen free mail servers called MailEnable and Axigen but unsure if they will do the job. Sorry if this seems like an easy or stupid question but never needed to do this before.
I am assuming due to the reference to Exchange that you are on Windows.
If you have an old box lying around that works, you could install linux on it and then choose from a number of different imap servers. Dovecot and Courier are both good choices and I have worked with them before.
You could use fetchmail to then pick up the mailboxes and then deliver to the imap boxes or get them deliver directly.
Setting up such a linux server for email was one of the first things I ever did on Linux. While initially daunting, once you get the hang of it, it is pretty straightforward and there are plenty of resources out there to help.
Ubuntu is probably the easiest to get used to. CentOs is also a reasonable choice.
You shouldn't be running your own server if you aren't willing to administer your own server, and they are not easy to configure if you don't know what you are doing (e.g., you mess up and you are exploited for spamming).
Look into a service like mailgun. In my application we are using them for forwarding to REST endpoints as well as onto another SMTP server.
Competitors that wound up not meeting my needs but may meet yours include Dyn, email yak, Sendgrid, etc. etc.
Why not just setup the mail clients to store their mail files on a standard network drive or share? I follow that this situation is pretty silly in your view - 100% because of the ridiculous constraints that you are being asked to work within: I would similarly find the solution I am suggesting ridiculous generally; but under the circumstances, it seems like a simple answer to your problem - replacing distributed mail storage and backup with centralized storage and backup.
Don't POP3 email clients have the option keep a copy on the server? Mine certainly does. See second tick box on the pic.
You can then periodically take a back up of all the emails from the server to stop it getting clogged up.
Novice in the tech aspects of email servers here:
Situation: We have an old hosting (and mail) provider that we're moving away from. They are using Mail Enable Enterprise (it's a microsoft server in case it matters and they don't have cPanel). They have 7 GB of our email messages on their server, we also have those messsages downloaded to a machine via IMAP.
We need to: transfer these messages to a new server / provider. I went ahead and asked HostGator tech.support and they are unable to do the import so I am looking for a different provider who can import the messages (and folders) and then just be a good email provider.
Question: Could you suggest a provider (does Google Apps do that?) that let's me import / upload messages to their server OR maybe suggest another way of solving this.
Well, you have IMAP on both sides, right?
Drag'n'drop in your email client will work just fine. Yes, it's a lot of data, and it might take a bit, but it's the simplest thing that might possibly work. It's hard to go wrong with simple things.
There's also imapsync, but then you'll need to already know the login information on both sides, which is something you might not have for every account on the old server.
A client is moving from their old hosting to mine. They have a few email accounts on the old hosting and I want to move all the emails on the old hosting to mine. How can I do this? If I download them with POP can I then upload them to the new hosting?
The answer depends on the mail server that you are using. Yes, you can download all the mail messages with POP3, but the upload to your mail server will depend on the type of mail server. I am not aware of any mail servers that provide a tool to import mail messages.
Most mail servers store the email message in a file, and you can certainly drop the files in the folder where they are stored, but that does not mean that it will be visible, you will have to deal with how the mail server index those files.
I suggest looking at the specifications for your mail server.
If you access both accounts with IMAP (most hosts support this now) instead of POP, you can literally drag and drop the messages between folders/inboxes for the two email accounts.
Also, depending on the type of hosting they're moving from/to, you may be able to use a feature of your new server's control panel to do the importing...unless you're doing it manually on a vanilla VPS or dedicated. There are still options, but you'd need to confirm here how your new server is setup and what the old server looks like.
If you're only talking about a couple of accounts with a few folders each, you may just want to consider IMAP as your path of least resistance. The transfer will primarily depend on your own Internet connection, as most hosting companies have connections faster than yours.
Lastly, if both servers share a similar format for the mailbox, you might want to just rsync the email over to the new server (assuming you have root access on both servers) to the proper email directory. Depending on the email box format, you may be able to simply run a server command to "convert" the mailbox to the format your server is expecting.