When a user or IMAP client expunges a message or an entire folder, messages become unavailable to the user.
When the deletion is accidental, administrators may have to recover the messages from some place. When the messages are purposefully deleted, the user may have done so not with the best of intentions.
In any case, the time between a message arriving and being deleted may not be sufficient to ensure the message is replicated, included in the next backup cycle, and generally available for recovery or compliance with the regulatory environment.
Cyrus IMAP introduces delayed expunge, which ensures message files are not immediately unlinked from the filesystem, and instead makes purging the message files from the filesystem a separate event.
This enables administrators to quickly recover access to messages that have been accidentally deleted, as well as allows the environment to ensure messages remain available for inclusion in the next backup cycle.
To enable or disable Delayed Expunge, please check the following settings in :cyrusman:`imapd.conf(5)`.
.. seealso::
* :ref:`imap-reference-manpages-systemcommands-unexpunge`
* :ref:`imap-features-delayed-delete`
* :ref:`imap-admin-deleted-expired-expunged-purged`
Back to :ref:`imap-features`