Moving to a new box instructions - issue when doing in-place replacement of box

[massimocode]

https://mailinabox.email/maintenance.html#moving-boxes

If you are reformatting the box, or replacing the VM with a new VM using the same IP address, then I believe there may be a window between installing mailinabox and restoring backups where new mail received in that window could be lost once the old backup is restored. Is that the case? If so, it might be worth mentioning it in the steps for moving boxes.

[Synchro]

The solution to that would be to stop the server before taking the backup. Mail will then fail to be delivered during the downtime, but senders will retry later. Such is the joy of SMTP...

[massimocode]

Of course we would stop the old server before taking the backup and thankfully the current instructions say that. The issue I was referring to is that as we're installing the new server, mailinabox becomes active, and THEN we're supposed to restore backups. So anything in that window before backups are restored could potentially get overwritten. Unless restoring backups doesn't overwrite the new emails.

[Synchro]

Block inbound mail at the firewall/cloud provider during installation?

[myfirstnameispaul]

This is a very good reason to have MiaB on its own domain, as in one domain used for the server, itself, that otherwise is rarely receiving a message that would be missed.

Another option would be something in the installation that asks if this box will be used for restoration, then something like do not start services so they have to be manually started after restoration or include the restoration as part of the initial setup.

As it is currently, if the box is configured with a domain used for hosting mail, I would go the firewall route or stop services route - I think stopping postfix is good enough, but dovecot would prevent client devices from doing anything. If you figure something out along these lines, please submit a change to the mailinabox.email repo to help others out who may have the same issue.