Our mailboxes have all been rewritten to contain a number of "Welcome to 
your mailbox", "About the spam folder" etc messages, but all of our 
current and historical mail, and the folders it was structured into, 
have disappeared.

Also one the webmail interfaces (Squirrelmail) now says:
Error opening ../data/default_pref
Could not create initial preference file!
/mail/data/ should be writable by user apache
Please contact your system administrator and report this error.

The other (RoundCube) just shows all the mailboxes as above.

Fingers crossed that AAISP will get this back quickly.


More generally, it brings me back to a task I never finished ages ago, 
which is to run a local backup because AAISP have not committed to 
adequate service levels around mailbox backup.  I would be very 
interested if anyone has worked through this and found a good piece of 
software which will run on a Windows machine unattended, access all our 
IMAP mailboxes including their folder hierarchy, and copy incrementally 
to a local drive.  I know I can do this with Thunderbird manually but it 
is too much of a kludge to be an automated solution.

I did look at "IMAPSIZE" but for some reason didn't install it, can't 
recall why.  Anyone else solved this one?

ann.onomess_spamtrapdeletethis_@googlemail.com wrote:
<snip>
> More generally, it brings me back to a task I never finished ages ago, 
> which is to run a local backup because AAISP have not committed to 
> adequate service levels around mailbox backup.  I would be very 
> interested if anyone has worked through this and found a good piece of 
> software which will run on a Windows machine unattended, access all our 
> IMAP mailboxes including their folder hierarchy, and copy incrementally 
> to a local drive.  I know I can do this with Thunderbird manually but it 
> is too much of a kludge to be an automated solution.
> 
> I did look at "IMAPSIZE" but for some reason didn't install it, can't 
> recall why.  Anyone else solved this one?
> 
> 
> 
It is a *long* time since I used IMAP.  However I recall Thunderbird has 
an option to maintain a local copy of mail.  This then would backup 
using normal local procedures.  I find "Synchronize It!" an excellent 
backup program, but I don't know if it runs unattended. TB would need to 
be not running though during a backup I suspect.

-- 
      Tony Firshman
<firstname>@<surname>.co.uk