Unable to undelete emails from roundcubemail

[Lance Charette]

On 9/20/2017 2:03 AM, Liutauras Adomaitis wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2017 m. rugsėjo 19 d., antradienis 21:37:28 EEST Homer Dokes wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I have a user who has inadvertently deleted all the emails in a series
>> of folders.  The emails are still in their physical mailbox directories
>> on the server and they can be seen grayed out within the roundcubemail
>> environment and each one can be selected and the contents reviewed.
>>
>> The issue is that they want to un-delete these emails and I have read
>> that there is suppose to be a way to do this within roundcubemail by
>> right clicking on the folder and selecting 'un-delete' however this
>> option does not exist in either of two different Kolab 3.4
>> installations.  (I will add that I have done recent (withing last 2
>> weeks) updates of both services for the Kolab environment.
>>
>> In addition, when attempting to use the expunge command at the CLI it
>> does not see any of these emails as being marked for deletion or
>> available for recovery tho they are clearly residing in their respective
>> mailbox on the hard drive, can be see (tho grayed out) within
>> roundcubemail, and can have their contents reviewed.  If I toggle the
>> 'do not show deleted emails' in roundcubemail then these emails
>> disappear from the roundcubemail display.
>>
>> The same information I have read suggests that the 'un-delete' option
>> from the pop up menu's has to be 'enabled' however there is no reference
>> there or in any search on the internet for enabling this option.
>>
>> So.... to recount....
>>
>> emails have been marked for deletion
>> emails can still be seen in kolab and look to be marked for deletion as
>> they are grayed out (further substantiated by enabling 'do not show
>> deleted emails' and having the emails in question disappear)
>> emails are still in their respective mailbox on the hard drive
>> emails do not show as marked for deletion when using [su - -s /bin/bash
>> cyrus -c "/usr/lib/cyrus-imapd/unexpunge -l
>> user/john.doe/Repairs at example.org"]
>> roundcubemail option to 'un-delete' in right click pop up menu does not
>> exist
>> we can find no where either in config files or through user settings on
>> roundcubemail to enable the un-delete option.
>>
>> I also searched the users mailing list and could find nothing on this.
>>
>> In a word........   help?
>>
>> As always.... thanks to anyone who can shed light on this.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> users mailing list
>> users at lists.kolab.org
>> https://lists.kolab.org/mailman/listinfo/users
> To undelete ( or should I say un-mark for deletion) the message you should
> click on "start" column of that particular message.
>
> There are 2 different things:
> - mark message as deleted and
> - expunge message
>
> Mark message for deletion is IMAP protocol "thing" and it is just a flag for a
> message. IMAP client application (roundcubemail is one of them) can decide how
> to show such flaged messages.
>
> Expunge - that is actually remove message from the mailbox. After the message
> is expunged it is no longer in the mailbox and user can't unexpunge that
> anymore. It is gone.
> But, if you configure Cyrus IMAP for delayed expunge (which is default), Cyrus
> IMAP will not remove the message file from the disk for some time. So even
> though user can't unexpunge the expunged message, sysadmin with access to
> Cyrus IMAP server can do that with unexpunge utility provided by Cyrus.
>
> So all your observations are correct and as the messages were marked forl
> deletion you should see those messages as still being in the mailbox, but
> should not see flaged messages with unexpunge utility, as those messages were
> not expunged.
>
> Liutauras

Thank you Liutauras for the reply.

Can you provide additional information as to what the 'start' column of 
a message may be?  In the messages list of a given folder in 
roundcubemail, I can find no reference to a 'start' column anywhere nor 
anything that one could click on to toggle the un-mark for deletion flag 
and I have clicked on every icon on the page to attempt such an 
action.   Nothing on the screen toggles the 'marked for deletion' item 
back to un-marked.  I could find nothing in an internet search that 
spoke to this 'start' column either.  Further, isn't it quite counter 
productive if one has to perform this process on each individual email 
if many emails were mistakenly marked for deletion in one action (which 
is what happened here)?  Seems a user should be able to reselect all 
those particular emails, right click and have an 'undelete' option right 
below the delete option in the pop up menu.  Right now, as the 
administrator, I would settle for an ability to force an undelete on all 
the emails in a given user mailbox at the command line but that doesn't 
look to exist either.

Everything else you referred to above I fully understand.  In this case 
both Kolab servers I am working with are set for delayed expunge (which 
has been reduced to 14 days from the default 69 days) and the emails in 
question that were deleted were done so within the 14 day window.  I am 
merely trying to un-mark them for deletion before the end of that 14 day 
window but appear to have no means to accomplish this.

Thanks

hdokes