Dreamhost E-mail Retention "Policy"
I use Dreamhost. I’m actually someone who really likes them. I was just wondering, do they have an e-mail retention policy?
Not really. But they have an e-mail backup system. Basically, your e-mail is backed up, but only accessible two weeks in the past.
If you access your Dreamhost account via UNIX/SSH, in your home directory “cd .snapshot”—”.snapshot” is a hidden directory. You can’t see it with an “ls -al.”
In .snapshot, you’ll see these directories:
hourly.0/ hourly.1/ nightly.0/ nightly.1/ weekly.0/ weekly.1/
“weekly.1” will be a backup of your account from two weeks ago. In there, there’s a directory “Maildir”. Maildir is a backup of all your e-mail at that point in time, i.e., two weeks ago.
Therefore, if you’re worried about e-mail retention, Dreamhost only keeps a snapshot of your e-mail from two weeks ago. If you’re looking to recover e-mail that you’ve deleted, you’ve only got a two week window. If you *want* your e-mail to disappear, then you have to age it for two weeks after deleting it for it to be *gone*.