Reading .MAI Files

[Ptarver]

I have a situation where an email client has had some problem with employees that are no longer with the company. They have asked me to recover about 20 days worth of snapshot email backups which I am currently working on delivering to them.

We choose to store all email in .MAI files as opposed to using the SQL storage and so the client will need to be able to open and view the .MAI files individually to perform their investigation of said employees and their activities.

Is there a program out there that can either be used to quickly import and organize these .mai files or better yet, can they install a program to open those files from Windows Explorer one at a time to view the message and view or extract any embedded documents from the .mai files?

I know I can read them with a text editor and that has been sufficient in the past, however, in this case, there will be thousands of emails to be reviewed and I'm trying to offer my client the fastest way possible to do this.

I know they could install a copy of ME on a server and access the information, but it seems like it should be easier than that to read individual .MAI files. It will be my luck that it is something really obvious and I'm going to look stupid for asking this question, but in the 5+ years that I've been using ME it hasn't come up and frankly, I'm having problems asking the right question to a search engine to find an answer.

Any assistance would be appreciated!
Thanks!

[onewilliamsway]

Hi Ptarver,

I suggest to create a new account on Mailenable and dump all these MAI files there. Then your client can choose between Webmail, IMAP or even POP3 download to their preferred email client.

William

[Ptarver]

I can appreciate your suggestion and I would probably take it if I were restoring just a single mailbox. However, this procedure required a complete restoration of the entire post office from a backup set that included two back ups per day for 20 days. The final restored and consolidated post office comprised almost 9Gb and almost 55,000 emails. I found a couple of programs that would browse the files after I renamed them to .EML files, but neither solution is very good because one only allows you to browse one folder at a time (ie: you can't start at the top level folder and drill down) and the other one will not allow you to sort the emails by date.

Our solution so far is to use a text file search tool to locate .mai files that contain a specific word or phrase and then use the simple EML browsers I've found to locate and view the specific files the search tool located. This is cumbersome and slow especially with the large number of files we are working with. However, it is a workable solution until I discover a better way.

One question: Could I create a mailbox for the client and then copy all of the folders and files into that mailbox and then login to the webmail as you describe to view the messages? Would I need to delete the index files or anything before attempting to view these folders within the new mailbox?

Thanks!

[onewilliamsway]

Hi Ptarver,

It has been awhile since the last post. To answer your question, Yes, it'll work. You'll also need to remove the _folder.xml from all the root folders and then copy in a _change.dty file to force it to reindex.

[Ptarver]

Sorry for the delay in responding. I tried the suggestion and it worked as you stated.

Thanks for the help and the good advice!

[bmark]

Hi Ptarver and William,

excuse me for the question,
I would like to ask what kind of software or method used to make backups of ME ,
can you suggest me something ?

Thank you

Mark

[Ptarver]

In our case, we are using Acronis Backup Software on our Win2008 Server which images our entire data drive each night and we maintain those images for a period of 7 days. Additionally, we are using the Shadow Copy service that is part of the Win2008 Server, we create 3 shadow copies per day and then retain those shadow copies for up to 30 days.

Hope that helps!
Thanks!
PHT