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I can't find any documentation on how postfix stores email. Where is it stored, and in what format? I'm using Ubuntu server 11

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2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Probably /var/mail/[username] or the more traditional /var/spool/mail/[username]

The normal format, called "mbox", uses a line that starts with "From " to indicate the start of each message - this is one reason why many email clients will change "From " in the body of the message to ">From ". You can also configure it to use "maildir", in which /var/mail/[username] is a directory in which every email message is a file in that directory.

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This is of course assuming that the user doesn't have procmail configured to do it for him instead. – Shadur Oct 26 '11 at 5:13
It's also assuming that they haven't installed cyrus-sasl which moves things around. We're trying to keep things simple. – Paul Tomblin Oct 26 '11 at 13:00
up vote 3 down vote

For outbound mail (you didn't specify, and inbound is answered elsewhere) it is in /var/spool/postfix. If you look there you will find all sorts of subdirectories.

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I cannot find my outbound mails inthere on my debian machine. – simonpie May 6 at 0:45
I cannot find my outbound mails in there on my debian machine. This directory is used but things there are store only trensiently. Alpine stores outbound emails in /home/[username]/mail/sent-mail for example. – simonpie May 6 at 0:57

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