[Dovecot] keep users from deleting email

[Adam Williams]

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.