At 10:28 AM -0500 4/14/08, Adam Williams imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
Bill Cole wrote:
Um, really?
I've had a little experience with SOx, HIPAA, GLBA, and Federal E-Discovery compliance projects, and I've never heard that SOx applied at all to state agencies or that it requires anyone to archive all email forever. In fact, doing so as a matter of normal policy may be a very bad idea under the E-Discovery rules. I'm certainly no lawyer, but your management may want to find better ones than they seem to have...
Well it doesn't, but management wants us to archive all electronic data forever in a fashion that is compliant to that law.
You definitely need to be aware of the fact that one of the downsides of mbox is performance and resource demands as the mbox files grow.
What do you consider a large mbox? We have users with single mbox files of 3G and their mail loads up fine. We are using Seamonkey's email client and it makes a local index file of all the message to/from/subject/date/etc so it loads mail very quickly, pretty much instantaneous. One thing I don't like about Maildir is that it keeps each message as a seperate file, so you'll end up with directories with 20k+ files and run into glob problems, and with ext3, you have all these sub 4kb messages still taking up a 4k block on the disk, wasting disk space.
Well, I suppose that if you never delete any messages you avoid the worst mbox performance problems, since you never need to re-write the whole file. Between Dovecot's indexing and client-side indexing, mboxes that only ever get written to by adding more messages might not be such a big deal.
The interesting issue would then be the size of the Dovecot index files. I don't know if they are designed to work well when all of your users have tens of thousands of messages in their index. I expect you'll want a lot of RAM...
Bill Cole
bill@scconsult.com