Question Access to whole email server, not individual accounts

[SMD Computers]

Server operating system version

AlmaLinux 9.7 (Moss Jungle Cat)

Plesk version and microupdate number

18.0.75

One of my clients have had a Subject Access Request via GDPR that entails a search through all emails on a clients domain.

CPANEL used to allow you to have a master account that gave access to the whole email of the domain via the main account. This is not possible on PLESK. Is there a third party program or extensions that can do this, or a master password that can allow access to the emails.

 

[Kaspar]

There's no option for other people to access an email account, other than the email account user themself or server administrators with root access.

 

[SMD Computers]

I am the root user - with SSH access. I presume it involves resetting the password for the user?

 

[Kaspar]

As a server administrator with root SSH access you can, depending on what you want to accomplish exactly, utilize default linux utilities as well as some Plesk specific utilities.

Since you mentioned you're working on a Subject Access Request, I assume you to search trough multiple email accounts for emails from or to a particular sender. For this you could for example use the doveadm, which is a powerful command line tool to perform a variety of mailbox operations. (It has a some what of a steep learning curve. It took me some time to realize that what doveadm considers to be 'mailbox' is actually just a mailbox folder and not a email account.) Of course you can also just use grep to search trough the email directory of a domain (located at /var/qmail/mailnames/example.com) for a specific string, as each email is stored as a plain file.

You can also run /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/mail_auth_view to get an list of all email accounts and the associated passwords, unless password are stored encrypted. Which would allow you to access an email account directly via webmail for example without the need to change the password.