Clients IMAP disaster - advice needed

[JoyDivision]

A client uses IMAP on his email hosting. On Friday the servers went down and now he has lost all his email on all the clients. The PST files seem to have synced with the IMAP server.

The host is saying there is no backups of the emails they are all gone, when he logs into web mail again all emails have gone.

Is there anything I can do to try and recover them? The PST files are locally stored but it seems they have stored the ones which were on the IMAP server so are they gone for ever?

Can anybody recomend a better solution so this does not happen again?

 

[PureIT]

What client were they using to access the IMAP on the server? Depending on how many mailboxes I would suggest a hosted exchange solution with a reputable company which actually backs up the mailstore.

I can't actually believe that your host has no backups!

We offer hosted exchange from £10 a mailbox

Contact me if you are interested at [email protected]

Regards

James

 

[JoyDivision]

Its not my host, I have no idea who the company he uses is but after a bit of digging it turns out it was the clients web guys host.

I don't know how this failure occured but I now have the night mare of moving the email settings from the domain to a new company.

I feel partly to blame due to a phone call with him as he phoned me up a few months ago describing the problem he is having, I said you need to ask your host if he can move you to IMAP rather than POP3 .

 

[PureIT]

Suggest a new host - as I said previously we can advise. No doubt in time you will have numerous replies about googlemail, hotmail, ISP email and all manner of opensource email hosting.

Depends on what you need and want really

 

[Seal-tech]

Hi Joydivision

In this case POP3 would possibly have been better as the emails could have been set to save locally aswell as on the server. By using imap then it is my understanding that it syncs with what is on the server and as such if there are no emails on the server then you lose everything.
Lots of options available to you and I would suspect Pure can help you with those.

 

[edmondscommerce]

Google Apps is great

I trust them not to lose my data, the web interface is excellent, its free

pretty easy sell really

POP3 can be just as bad as IMAP, or even worse, because then the backing up of emails is down to the desktop user as it removes them from the server doesn't it?

 

[Seal-tech]

IIRC - you can configure your POP3 client to leave messages on the server or download them.
I dont use POP3 often so could be wrong - the google apps sounds like an ideal solution in this case.

 

[JoyDivision]

Thanks for the suggestions. Is there anyway i can recover the emails which were stored in the outlook imap cache? That is the main concern at the moment.

 

[Seal-tech]

I would say no - as they were updated the last time they sync's with the server. might be worth a google !

 

[Seal-tech]

Try searching for *.dbx files under the user profile and you might be lucky.

 

[Leo-InstallingIT]

Hi

Just a thought, if its the web developer he may not actually be the host - just a reseller. Are you able to check who the host is (i.e where the DNS points to), you may be in luck that they actually have backups and the web guy hasn't gone that far...

Long shot, but might be worth it.

To be honest there isn't really anything wrong with IMAP if you have decent backups (not relying on someone). Unless there are other things they werent happy with there setup, I would suggest just sorting decent hosting out and continuing to use IMAP.

Many Thanks

Leo

 

[REBOOTTHAT]

Hi,

To prevent this from happening in the future I recommend some sort of local backup.

DON'T rely on ANY hosted solution to save your e-mails and provide back-up if things go wrong. Google, Amazon, the lot!

As the old saying goes "Don't put all your eggs in one basket", and if you are relying on an hosted e-mail solution to also provide your backups then you might get what's coming to you!

This, of cause, depends on the size of the network.

If you have a small network, then you could set-up your e-mail client to autoarchieve (copy) users mailboxes to a central shared drive. Then either back-up to tape or use one of the many (cheap) on-line storage services that are available this very moment.

Dell datasafe offer 100GB of automatic data storage for the small amount of £35 per-year. It also takes out the unreliable human factor of swapping tapes, etc.

For most of my business clients I pay for the on-line backup myself, as £35 is a small amount to pay compared to losing customer data.

Sorry for the rant, have a nice evening

 

[KM-Tiger]

No doubt in time you will have numerous replies ... all manner of opensource email hosting.

Shock ... horror, they'll be suggesting stuff like Exim and Postfix, with Dovecot or Cyrus for the IMAP. Can't imagine why so much internet email is entrusted to free stuff like that, and blimey even some big businesses use it. How do they sleep at night?

Surely the issue here is to go with a host that does proper backups, not what software is in use.

 

[Page]

If you were using Thunderbird I think you can headers back but not the email since TB stores these !!

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

JoyDivision,

alas, I think the emails may be lost.

Going forward, the googls apps solution would be a great switch - have a look here.

 

[JoyDivision]

I won't be able to get him to move away from Outlook, its too central to his business.

There is a backup which exists but I have been told they don't know which email is which. Surely this is just an excuse and it won't be that difficult to? I think my client needs to have words directly with the host and cut out the middle man.

I have got this job tomorrow and I have no idea where to start with it, because migrating to a new email system is never instant is it in terms of domain records being updated.

I have had a look on google and can't seem find any ways to recover the files .

I guess this is a lesson to me as well, in future I will warn clients using this system,