Restore a Mailbox

On occasion, a system administrator may need to restore a user's mailbox. This may be necessary if the user accidentally deleted all his mail or if the mailbox becomes corrupt. While SmarterMail does not perform any backups of the file system, a user's mailbox may be restored if an administrator has a backup procedure in place. 

NOTE: Newer versions of SmarterMail can restore user data from within the Web interface, without stopping the SmarterMail service. For instructions on the newer method of restoring user data, please refer to the KB article Restore a User's Account, Folders, or Emails.

Applies to SmarterMail 8.x - 15.x

Follow these steps to restore a user's mailbox:

1. Using your restore software, restore a copy of the users mailbox to a temporary folder. For the purpose of this article, we will call this C:\temp\mailbox. 
2. Log into the SmarterMail as the user, click the Email icon and create a temporary folder. For the purpose of this article, we will call this folder "backup," however, it can be named differently.
3. On the server, navigate to the backup folder and delete the mailbox.cfg file from this folder. By default, the backup folder you created will be at C:\SmarterMail\Domains\\Users\\backup.
4. Move the files from C:\temp\mailbox to the backup folder.
5. Restart the SmarterMail service.
6. From here, you can log into SmarterMail as the user and move the emails from the backup folder to any folder you would like. You may also leave the emails in this folder.

For more information, refer to the SmarterMail Online Help.

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