Recovering Dovecot mailboxes from disk (cPanel, Maildir format to Mbox)
I was given a backup of a hard drive containing cPanel-managed mailboxes and wanted to recover them into a readable format. When spinning up a new server using the drive backup, I could no longer access webmail or IMAP due to a cPanel license issue which I tried to work around but quickly disregarded. cPanel uses Dovecot to manage user mail.
What follows is a quick manual on how to recover and read Dovecot mailboxes given only disk access, a couple of scripts and a mail client that can read Mbox files.
We assume the mailboxes are stored in the Maildir++ format. These can be recognized by their directory structure: they always contain subdirectories cur, new, and usually tmp.
1. Find and copy the mailboxes
On my particular cPanel-managed server, the maildirs were located in /home/<user>/mail and there were also sub-maildirs in /home/<user>/mail/<domain>/<account>
Specific folders in the mailboxes used hidden directories like .Sent or .Trash.
You should be able to find maildirs by running:
find / -type d -name curCopy them all to a temporary workspace directory somewhere.
2. Unzip e-mails where necessary
I found that some of the e-mails were garbled when later converting the maildir to an mbox file.
This turned out to be because some (newer) mails were being stored gzipped.
I wrote a quick shell script to walk over all the e-mails and g-unzip them: maildir-gunzip.sh
Don’t use it on the originals, make a copy first!
To use:
chmod +x maildir-gunzip.sh # Make it executable
./maildir-gunzip.sh /path/to/copy-of-maildir3. Convert to an Mbox file
Mbox files are a convenient, and perhaps the most common format for moving mailboxes around.
There is a nice script called maildir2mbox.py which has been adapted by various people over the years.
The most recent version I could find was one by Github user bluebird75. Download the script here. (mirror)
Make sure you have Python v3 installed on your machine.
Run the script like so:
maildir2mbox -r /path/to/maildir-copy outputfile.mboxThis Dovecot docs page contains an alternative script for this written in Perl, as well as some scripts for converting between other formats.
4. Open the Mbox file
Any email client that can read Mbox files will do.
I used Evolution. In Evolution, go to File > Import and follow the steps.
Make sure you make a new directory to import in so you can easily delete the emails later.