recovering accidently deleted email account

[dtbaker]

Hey all.
A client misunderstood instructions to delete his email account from outlook and managed to remove it from plesk.
I told him the weeks worth of mail is gone for good, but have been trying to recover at least some information from the deleted emails (ie who sent them to that account).

I have already searched the maillogs and retreived some 'sender email addresses' however the crucial emails were submitted via a PHP form on his site.. so this leaves no sender email address in the maillog files.

Besides doing the grep on /dev/hda4 (etx3) for his email address and hoping there is enough data left over to recover parts of a few emails, can you think of any other ways to find these lost emails?
Is there some ultra top-secret plesk folder that stores all mail from deleted email accounts?

*grin*

any ideas would be great

(i dont currently backup clients emails as most use POP3)

cheers heaps
dave.

 

[chris@virtbiz]

Whoops! Sometimes customers make mistakes that hosts cannot dig them out of.

If you do not keep nightly backups and cannot go back to a backup where the account still existed, I'm afraid your customer is out of luck.

 

[eilko]

you might have a backup of /var/qmail/mailnames/ That's where the account existed....