Find locally delivered mails which we never got in our mailbox

Virtualmin
1

Hi,

We had a website created in Virtualmin and enabled ‘mail for domain’. The contact form of the websites sents an e-mail to info@domain.com. However, info@domain.com was hosted on Office 365. A couple of months later we discovered that mails from the contact form were never delivered.

I thought, must be local delivery, server thinks it must be delivered locally because mailbox domain and website domain is same. So I disabled ‘mail for domain’ setting on virtual server, and voila contact form works again.

However, we are missing mails over the last 2 months. Since the mailbox info@domain.com didn`t exist on the virtual server the mails are all vanished. I wonder, is there some way to get back these mails? What happens if Virtualmin / webserver delivers a mail locally and the mailbox does not exists? Does it save the mail to some folder, or does it just delete the mail?

Thanks!

2

Howdy,

There ikely isn’t a way to get the emails back, though depending on how far back your logs go, you may be able to determine what happened to them.

You can use the email logs, either /var/log/maillog or /var/log/mail.log, to see everything that Postfix is up to as it receives and delivers email.

Postfix, when delivering locally, will hand over emails to procmail to perform the delivery process.

Procmail puts it’s logs in /var/log/procmail.log. That will show you the specific directory an email was delivered to.

-Eric