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Email Messages Missing

Aaron Horsley
  • Updated

Symptoms

 

When logging into my email, I noticed some of the messages are no longer present. Where did they go?  

 

Description 

 

When Email goes missing, this is often from a user accessing this with a mail client and that mail client downloads and removes, or deletes the mail from the server. To recovery Email, you will need to restore your account.

 

Workaround

 

Although to recover your Email, you do need to restore the mail files; you can add additional logging in case this does happen again.

 

How to enable the Dovecot mail-log plugin

 

First, we want to perform a grep for the date range and domain in question. Grep for pop and get a count. Replace the month with the three-letter abbreviation and your days. In this case, this represents Jul 25-29th. 

 

grep -cP 'Jul 2[5-9].+pop.+test.tld' /var/log/maillog

 

If no results are found, this would indicate it was done over an IMAP connection. By default, dovecot does not log this information and requires additional configurations to be added. To enable more verbose logging in order to check this in case it happens again, You can modify the Dovecot configuration and add the following for additional IMAP logging. To add logging to the Dovecot configuration, you will want to set up a main.local file so that your changes are there going forward after new configuration builds, and still make modifications via WHM.

 

 

First, navigate to the folder that contains the dovecot template:

 

First, navigate to the folder that contains the dovecot template:

 

cd /var/cpanel/templates/dovecot2.3

 

Next, copy the main.default to main.local

 

cp main.default main.local

 

Find the section "protocol imap {" and add the following line to after the last "mail_plugins=" entry

 

mail_plugins = $mail_plugins mail_log notify

 

Add the following right before the "protocol imap {" section ends

 

plugin {
# Events TWEET available to log: append copy delete expunge flag_change mailbox_delete mailbox_rename undelete
mail_log_events = append copy delete expunge flag_change mailbox_delete mailbox_rename undelete
# Available fields: uid, box, msgid, from, subject, size, vsize, flags
# size and vsize are available only for expunge and copy events.
mail_log_fields = uid box msgid size subject flags
}

 

Rebuild the dovecot.conf

 

/scripts/builddovecotconf

 

Restart dovecot

 

/scripts/restartsrv_dovecot

 

 Please also refer to the dovecot logging documentation if you need to make further modifications to the logging.

Dovecot Logging

Be sure to disable the mail-log plugin when completed. How to disable the Dovecot mail-log plugin

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