Recover the dates emails were received

[WebsitesinBristol]

Hello everyone, this is my first post so please forgive me for any mistakes!

A Client of mine has cPanel though GoDaddy and through a mistake of my own, I have accidentally managed to delete the entire email server while uploading an edit to their website. (When I thought I was in the public HTML file I was actually in the home directory ). I have gone into trash and recovered all the files however when I recovered emails, they have re-downloaded as having all come through in Microsoft Outlook as if they were received today (Monday 24th February 2020) at 17:49. On the other hand, this is not the case when I go into horde webmail and look at the messages, they all appear to have the correct dates. I have tried removing then re-adding the email account from Microsoft Outlook however the emails once again the emails come through as if they were all received today at 17:49. The other odd thing is that it hasn't affected which emails were marked as read and which weren't -the has stayed the same-.

Some screenshots of the dates can be found below.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! The cPanel version is 78.0 (build 38)
Thanks Will!

 

[cPanelLauren]

Hello,

Unfortunately, the mail client views these as new separate messages, while they were removed on the server they weren't removed from the mail client and because the dovecot index was rebuilt when they were restored there wouldn't be another way to go about this as far as I am aware. The issue is the date stamp on the files themselves that the mail client is receiving.

A full restore of the mail directory from a backup might resolve this but you'd want to verify with the hosting provider as to whether or not this is something they would facilitate, furthermore as to whether or not they could perform dovecot maintenance for the account.

 

[WebsitesinBristol]

Hello,

Unfortunately, the mail client views these as new separate messages, while they were removed on the server they weren't removed from the mail client and because the dovecot index was rebuilt when they were restored there wouldn't be another way to go about this as far as I am aware. The issue is the date stamp on the files themselves that the mail client is receiving.

A full restore of the mail directory from a backup might resolve this but you'd want to verify with the hosting provider as to whether or not this is something they would facilitate, furthermore as to whether or not they could perform dovecot maintenance for the account.

Hi, thanks for responding, I found if I use POP rather than IMAP the email dates stay. While not a permanent fix, it will allow them to print everything required then I will revert to IMAP afterwards.