[Dovecot] keep users from deleting email

[Bill Cole]

At 9:36 AM -0500 4/14/08, Adam Williams wrote:
>Bill Cole wrote:
>>Presumably you're users are all using IMAP, since the question 
>>doesn't really make sense for POP users, whose view of mail is 
>>entirely local to their machines, not  the server.
>>
>>I'd argue that having the sort of in-your-face dysfunction you 
>>describe is probably not the best approach unless user antagonism 
>>is one of your goals. You would probably be better off making a 
>>user's deletion into a server-side hiding/archiving. The "Lazy 
>>Expunge" plugin can do that. 
>>http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Lazyexpunge
>Thanks, I agree with you.  However, I just do what management tells 
>me to do, and we're trying to get Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 
>compliant with our data.

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...

>Lazy Expunge only operates on Maildir format, and while dovecot's 
>website has instructions for converting from mbox to Maildir, mbox 
>works pretty good for us, and I don't want to fix what isn't broken.

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.
-- 
Bill Cole                                  
bill at scconsult.com