[Dovecot] keep users from deleting email

[Bill Cole]

At 8:58 AM -0500 4/14/08, Adam Williams wrote:
>Charles Marcus wrote:
>>I was thinking about a possible plugin - call it maybe 'fake-delete 
>>or something - that would move all messages that a user deletes to 
>>a hidden folder in their maildir, for admin purposes... you could 
>>also use the expire plugin to keep this from growing indefinitely.
>>
>>But to prevent them from deleting them altogether? Why?
>>
>>If you just want a read-only maildir, just do that - so only admins 
>>can delete messages from protected accounts...
>Management wants the users to be able to use the email like normal 
>(to read as normal, to file into mailboxes, etc) but not be able to 
>delete any email, ever, for archival/legal purposes.

Just so others don't read that as some sort of generally relevant 
good idea, it should be noted that as a government agency you have 
very special archival/legal  concerns, and that they may be even more 
unusual as an agency focused on historical information. Acme's 
Widgets Inc. would not be well-advised to use the Mississippi Dept. 
of Archives and History as a role model in email preservation.

I still would think that the particular approach you describe is 
looking at the archival requirements in the wrong place. Rather than 
interfering with how users work with their mail, you would probably 
be better off looking at the delivery process and having it create 
your permanent archive rather than treating the user-facing mailbox 
as the archive.

>  Also, I'm using the wu-imap mbox format and not the Maildir format 
>for keeping email, because a year ago I migrated away from wu-imap 
>to dovecot.

That eliminates the Lazy Expunge option...
-- 
Bill Cole                                  
bill at scconsult.com