1 Topic by yureeka

  • yureeka
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2020-01-22
  • Posts: 1

Topic: I bought a business, freelancers deleted all of the emails

==== REQUIRED BASIC INFO OF YOUR IREDMAIL SERVER ====
- iRedMail version (check /etc/iredmail-release):  v0.9.7
- Deployed with iRedMail Easy or the downloadable installer? Its the web version
- Linux/BSD distribution name and version: dont know
- Store mail accounts in which backend (LDAP/MySQL/PGSQL):  MySQL
- Web server (Apache or Nginx): Dont know
- Manage mail accounts with iRedAdmin-Pro? No
- [IMPORTANT] Related original log or error message is required if you're experiencing an issue.
====

Hello, I bought a business, and unfortunately the people who previously worked on it (freelancers) were not happy with this transition. They have deleted all of the emails in their business accounts and are refusing to introduce me to the clients. They are starting a competing business and are attempting to bring all of these clients with them. They are now charging me money to re-connect with my own clients (I do not have their contact information).

1. As an admin, Is it at all possible to restore deleted emails from user accounts?
2. If not, is it possible to at least get some database/list of email addresses that have sent emails to our domain? Surely there must be some record of this somewhere?

Thank you

----

Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by MuPp3t33r

  • MuPp3t33r
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2017-01-17
  • Posts: 149

Re: I bought a business, freelancers deleted all of the emails

Other than checking in the logs for the mails that were sent/received then I don't think there's much one can do. It might be helpful to do a DD image of the server asap and attempt a data recovery assuming data hasn't been overwritten yet.

Depending on the user's mail client configuration, you might be lucky enough to find that the deleted mails haven't been purged yet, which you might be able to see on Roundcube as a greyed out message which can be undeleted.

Unfortunately it's up to the admin to ensure backups are being done on the email messages.

There might be some legal recourse for you to follow in terms of the people holding your company data to ransom, you may want to seek legal advice there.

Going forward you might also want to look into an offsite/cloud based archiving solution, where I work we use Mimecast to index and archive all our emails and no user has the ability to delete from it, this allows accountability of users and for easy recovery of deleted messages

3 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
  • iRedMail Developers
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2009-05-06
  • Posts: 31,090

Re: I bought a business, freelancers deleted all of the emails

yureeka wrote:

2. If not, is it possible to at least get some database/list of email addresses that have sent emails to our domain? Surely there must be some record of this somewhere?

Besides log files mentioned by @MuPp3t33r, you can also find in "amavisd" database, table "maddr".