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Zimbra Restore Mails From Store Folder

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Zimbra Mailbox Structure

In Zimbra, each user is assigned a unique 'mailbox ID', which links him/her to their folder in /opt/zimbra/store/0.

Therefore a user with say mailbox ID '716', would have folder /opt/zimbra/store/0/716. The emails are stored in '.msg' format.

For more information on the structure, go here


The problem

Now this information is stored in LDAP, so if LDAP is corrupted or unrecoverable, we cannot associate the mailbox ID with the user ID.

But the store folder is intact.


The solution

We will have to trace which folder belongs to which user. Since each folder belongs to a single user, it is sufficient to determine with a few emails who the inbox belongs to.

So we follow these steps to recover it: In our case the backup store folder is /opt/zimbra/store.old/0

Go to the backup store folder: 

# cd /opt/zimbra/store.old/0

Save the script as 'findusers.sh', and the run the script. 

#!/bin/bash

for line in `ls`; do
echo $line >> /tmp/messagelist
cat $PWD/$line/msg/0/* | grep To: | sed 's/To: //' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -5 >> /tmp/messagelist
echo "" >> /tmp/messagelist
done

# /opt/zimbra/store.old/0/findusers.sh

This will return a list of top ten users (in /tmp/messagelist) whose name is present in the 'To:' field of the messages stored. Using the output of this, we can make a good estimate of the user's folder, but this needs to be confirmed manually as well, by reading the email.

The output returned will be as follows: 

546
     37 "mis opns" <mis@witalsee.com>,
     13 "dr brijesh singh rajawat" <brijeshsinghrajawat@witalsee.com>,
     12 'Secretary'=20
     12 <DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=3Dsecretary@witalsee.com=20
     7 <DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=3Drolucknow@witalsee.com=20

547
     23 "KolkataRO Witalsee" <rokolkata@witalsee.com>

12

To: <A = 
     11 "Pawan Kumar" <pawan.kumar@witalsee.com>
     11 KolkataRO Witalsee=20
11
To: <A title=3Drokolkata@witalsee.com=20

From this we can guess that the folder '547', ie /opt/zimbra/store.old/0/547, belongs to 'rokolkata@witalsee.com'.

But we need to confirm this by going to the folder /opt/zimbra/store.old/0/547, and reading a few sample emails to confirm that the directory belongs to 'rokolkata@witalsee.com'. Look for emails where there is only one recipient. This is a major clue. Also look for mails where there is one sender and and recipient of an outside domain. Since 'Sent' mails are also stored here, this would indicate that the email is sent by the user, to a remote recipient.

The mails can then be recovered by using zmmailbox as the Zimbra user.

Both the commands below give admin rights on zmmailbox prompt, so use any one. 

zmmailbox -zadmin

or 

zmmailbox adminAuthenticate -u https://server.domain.com:7071 admin@domain.com password

After that we create the 'Recovery' folder, and add messages to that folder from our old store folder. 

mbox> selectMailbox agmadmin@witalsee.com
mbox agmadmin@witalsee.com> createfolder /Recovery
mbox agmadmin@witalsee.com> addMessage /Recovery /opt/zimbra/store.old/0/809/msg/0

/opt/zimbra/store.old/0/809/msg/0 is the path to the folder containing the mails. Some IDs may have a large amount of mails, resulting in msg/1, msg/2, etc. These will have to be run one-by-one.

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