Question How to read or import e-mails from a Plesk backup (best practice)?

[King555]

Server operating system version

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.71 Update #2 Web Admin Edition

I need to restore or at least read some e-mails which are part of a Plesk backup. I have a backup file like backup_2507180000.tar and in this file I already found the mails as one part of the backup in the path \domains\example.com\backup_domainmail_2507180000.tzst\mail\Maildir\new.

Is there any easy way to read them properly or even a way to import them to my mail account or directly to my local mail software (Outlook)? What would be the best practice here?

I don't want to restore the whole backup! I just need the mails from it and I need them additionally to the mails already in my inbox.

 

[Sebahat.hadzhi]

You can restore separate components from Plesk backups, including email accounts:

• https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/...l-accounts-from-a-full-domain-backup-to-Plesk

 

[King555]

Thanks, but I do not want to restore the mail account itself. It's still there and actively used (which means that there are current mails in it which are not in the backup). I do not want to overwrite something.

The whole story is: I always fetched my mails via POP3 and deleted them on the server. I lost my local mail file (Outlook) and now I'm trying to restore at least some mails, which are part of the daily backups of about one week. So I need to restore the mails from 7 or 8 backup files. My Outlook file had a backup, which is one week old. So I want to restore the mails which were deleted on the server during that week, but which were in the Plesk backup before I could fetch them.

 

[Kaspar]

There might be faster or better ways to accomplish what you're after, but this is what come to my mind first as a solution: restore the Plesk backup on another (cheap temporary) server. That way you can recover the mails without overwriting anything in your existing mailbox. You can then copy or download the missing mails.

 

[Kaspar]

Additionally it's worth noting that when when you recover a mailbox from an account, existing messages won't be deleted or overwritten. So you should be able to recover mailbox from your backup(s) without it affecting your current messages. But if you want to be on the safe side, you can use my previous suggestion to recover on another server

 

[King555]

Restoring on my production server sounds too risky to me. But the idea with another server sounds not bad. But I would need a temporary trial license for Plesk. I could do it in a VM, which already exists, although it's not accessible at this moment (I did not only lose my current Outlook file but the whole PC).

 

[Kaspar]

[...] But I would need a temporary trial license for Plesk. [..]

Whenever you install Plesk on for the first time you opt to use a 14 day trail license after installation. The trail license is available by default for any new installation.

I could do it in a VM, which already exists, although it's not accessible at this moment (I did not only lose my current Outlook file but the whole PC).

Using a small VPS with a provider that charges usage by the hour (like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, ect) will cost you less than € 1 a day.

 

[King555]

Thanks, I will give it a try.