using dovecot, where is ICOMING mail stored?

[Gary Kline]

Does anybody know about this obscure stuff?

In late DEcember, 2007 my FreeBSD server started having serious
problems that were over my head.  I asked this list for help but no
one could help me; long-story-short, a guy from the DFW area, a
self-taught net-wizard came to my rescue.  Via the yahoo IM
application and thanks to a fellow here with two strong arms, this
network guy set me up with a pfSense firewall (on an old Kayak), and
fixed/changed stuff on my server.  He  installed some mail tool
called dovecot and deployed that on my server.  At the time I was
running FreeBSD everywhere except one of my four other computers.
He also found something to let me still use mutt.  I prefer CLI and
text--8859-1 or ASCII.  Hand on keyboard; my should got destroyed
many years ago so the less motion between keyboard and mouse, the
better.

This morning I found the 15 or 20 messages in my incoming mail queue
gone.  Vanished.  ---I do of course backup stuff in my ~/Maildir on
my server.  I checked my bup.  Nothing.  Does anybody know what
this dovecot does with its incoming mail files?  I only do one daily
backup that it ccron'd for 03:00  [[along with a bunch of other
critical directories, of course]]  

If I knew where else to tar -cyvf <whatever> I would do that,
especially with mail.  Particularly things that I consider
non-urgent.   

thanks for any clues!

gary




-- 
 Gary Kline  kline at thought.org  http://www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
           Journey Toward the Dawn, E-Book: http://www.thought.org
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