Hi all,

Messed up a bit here. Our mail server has limited storage, so periodically we get these 'mailbox over its size limit' messages, and we have to go clean it out (different departments, it's a mess, I know). Anyway, we recently switched from POP3 to IMAP, so you can guess: out of habit, I delete it all, and suddenly find myself without a local mail archive. Four months of mail lost, yay.
Now, I'm trying to find out whether they backup their mails (fingers crossed), but in the meantime I'm also trying to find out whether I can do something on our end. Our sysadmin does daily backups of all local storage, so if I have access to the file(s) where kmail2 stores its IMAP email messages locally, I can get that back and extract and archive all of the lost mails. Some googling found me .local/share/akonadi/file_db_data/, is that correct? If so, how do I extract these mails? Turn off sync, close kmail, replace the db files, start kmail, copy all mails to local, re-establish sync. Something like that? Any hints are welcome.

Closing in:

Code: Select all

 .local/share/akonadi/db_data/akonadi/parttable.ibd

seems to contain some of the non-deleted mails, let's see what I can get from the backup. Still could use a hand with this though.

It may work, or may not, as proper backup is in place just for 4.10, as far as I can see.

Well, it would help if someone could explain to me how kmail handles IMAP. When the IMAP account is synced, the mail text and attachments are stored somewhere on my pc, are they not? I'd be surprised if it was all kept in RAM.