[Dovecot] Method of archiving mail?
Hello
I have a situation in which a number of users have 10,000+ messages in the maildir, going back a few years. I'm not a fan of this many files lying around so I'd like to set up some kind of archiving, but one that will allow user's access to the old mails should they wish to see them.
I thought of a cron job trying to sift through messages pulling those what were older than x days, then writing some script to process a request from a user (date/time/from/to/subject/body text) and copy matching messages to a "query" folder in the maildir. However, a) I'm not good at this kind of thing, and b) I have a feeling it's already been done before.
Can anyone point me in the right direction please... is their software around to do this already?
Many thanks, Steve :)
I've been thinking of some kind of compressed archive system too. Every night messages older than x days are compressed and added to an archive on a slower, less expensive, but larger storage location (eg over NFS).
The user has access to a folder called "Archive" that, when requestsed, is decompressed and served up. It is presented in such a way that the user knows this is a slower storage format. eg may be they do a two step process of "Mounting Archive" then "Access Archive". I'd expect Mounting to take up to 60 seconds.
Then you can offer larger quotas on the Archive filesystem and keep the primary mail system empty, quick and responsive.
I haven't progressed to the stage where I've thought how one would actually go about this. Work out what you want it to look like from the user's perspective first and then work backwards to find out what you need to do to make that happen.
Daniel
Stephen Allen wrote:
Hello
I have a situation in which a number of users have 10,000+ messages in the maildir, going back a few years. I'm not a fan of this many files lying around so I'd like to set up some kind of archiving, but one that will allow user's access to the old mails should they wish to see them.
I thought of a cron job trying to sift through messages pulling those what were older than x days, then writing some script to process a request from a user (date/time/from/to/subject/body text) and copy matching messages to a "query" folder in the maildir. However, a) I'm not good at this kind of thing, and b) I have a feeling it's already been done before.
Can anyone point me in the right direction please... is their software around to do this already?
Many thanks, Steve :)
On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 15:02 +0000, Daniel Watts wrote:
I've been thinking of some kind of compressed archive system too. Every night messages older than x days are compressed and added to an archive on a slower, less expensive, but larger storage location (eg over NFS).
The user has access to a folder called "Archive" that, when requestsed, is decompressed and served up. It is presented in such a way that the user knows this is a slower storage format. eg may be they do a two step process of "Mounting Archive" then "Access Archive". I'd expect Mounting to take up to 60 seconds.
Then you can offer larger quotas on the Archive filesystem and keep the primary mail system empty, quick and responsive.
I haven't progressed to the stage where I've thought how one would actually go about this. Work out what you want it to look like from the user's perspective first and then work backwards to find out what you need to do to make that happen.
Hmm, why not simply use a compressed filesystem for the archive? That way the (de)compression is completely transparent to the user and the effort to set this up is absolutely minimal.
IIRC squashfs can do this, but my last contact with that fs has been a long time ago.
Regards
Udo Rader
-- B e s t S o l u t i o n . a t EDV Systemhaus GmbH
udo rader technischer leiter/CTO mobile ++43 660 5263642
eduard-bodem-gasse 8/3 A-6020 innsbruck fax ++43 512 935833 http://www.bestsolution.at phone ++43 512 935834
Daniel Watts wrote:
I haven't progressed to the stage where I've thought how one would actually go about this. Work out what you want it to look like from the user's perspective first and then work backwards to find out what you need to do to make that happen.
Thanks Daniel... we'll have to exchange ideas! Using your method, are you suggesting that the user make use of Window's "Search..." feature to search the files in the mounted volume? That would be simplest I suppose. My ideas was to have the user send an email "request" to the server, which would then copy all matching messages into a special folder in the mail file... eg. "Query", so the next time they looked at that folder, their results would be there. I fear this is slightly more complex, but keeps all the processing on the server and involves minimal user education.
Steve :)
participants (3)
-
Daniel Watts
-
Stephen Allen
-
Udo Rader