[Dovecot] Disallow Deletion from Trash Folder

[Professa Dementia]

On 2/28/2013 12:40 PM, Bradley Rintoul wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I've been tasked with trying to find a way to keep users from ever "permanently"
> deleting emails.  The users are running Thunderbird and are using the "Archive"
> option for when emails are deleted.  However, they are still able to delete
> emails from the Archive folders...  I'm wondering if there's any way that I can
> configure Dovecot to make sure that emails *never* get removed from the
> filesystem.  I know it's probably kind of a bizarre request, but is there any
> way that Dovecot can help me out in this regard?

In addition to the answer of locking the Archive folder, provided by 
Michael, consider that requests of this kind often are the result of a 
client or customer having a problem for which they came up with the 
proposed solution.

I hope the machine has a lot of disk space.

Depending on where the machine is, laws may require keeping emails for a 
certain period of time, keeping them then purging them after a period of 
time, etc.  By asking the requester what problem they have that this 
solution is trying to solve, you can often get to the root of the 
problem and offer a solution that may work better.

Forbidding archive deletion is going to require more work from the 
admin, because unless the admin is willing to regularly go through and 
manually delete old emails, eventually, the disk will fill up with all 
sorts of resulting problems.

Also, consider how this may impact mail server behavior if any quotas 
are in effect.  Could be a clash.

Depending on what the original problem is, several solutions might be 
adding a dummy account and have all emails copied to it, on a separate 
drive (NFS, sshfs or dsync, maybe?) or using shared mailboxes.

Cheers.

Dem