[Dovecot] What exactly do you mean by archiving?

[Andreas Ntaflos]

On Saturday 10 October 2009 13:34:39 dhottinger at harrisonburg.k12.va.us 
wrote:
> I mean every single email sent and recieved is kept for a period of
> time (3 -5 years) separate from users mail, and emails cant be
> deleted.  Ideally emails would have compression, mailboxes need to be
> searchable easily, and some mechanism whereby attachments sent to
> multiple people only get saved once, and emails sent to multiple
> people only get saved once.  

Well my solution certainly will not fulfil all your requirements as it 
doesn't do compression and saves all mail and all attachments, 
regardless of number of recipients. Obviously you need some disk space, 
but that's really cheap these days. And since ACLs (as mentioned) don't 
work just right yet the archived messages would be deletable if the 
Backup namespace wasn't hidden from the users. 

My setup just does what it promises: saving all sent and received mail 
for every user on the system. This could actually be considered a 
feature, as it were, since it is a true, private, per-user backup where 
restoring messages wouldn't require any action from the administrator. 
However, I'm sure it can be refined (e.g. using ACLs) and I am open for 
suggestions.

> I could do something with procmail that
> copies every email coming in to another directory easily, but that
> doesnt solve the sent email.  

Well, sending mail is handled by the MTA (Sendmail in your case, Postfix 
in ours) so that is where you need to hook into to archive sent mail. 
The sender_bcc_maps parameter in Postfix is such a hook. You might want 
to have a look at [1] for that. 

I haven't found any way for this other than BCC'ing the message back to 
the sender and I don't think there is any. The beauty of it is its 
transparency and simplicity at the (minor) cost of an additional, local 
SMTP connection.

> Ive looked at several commercial
> products, but none seem to work nicely with sendmail.  Thanks for the
> information, I'll look and see if sieve will work better for me than
> procmail.  Im not sure thought that your method will pass the test
> come litigation time (if that every happens).

If it is an option I strongly suggest getting rid of Sendmail and using 
a secure, well-documented, feature-rich and easy to administer MTA like 
Postfix. Your life as administrator will be easier.

Andreas

[1] http://www.postfix.org/ADDRESS_REWRITING_README.html#auto_bcc
-- 
Andreas Ntaflos 

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