[Dovecot] Method of archiving mail?

[Daniel Watts]

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 :)