Archiving Mail

[Julian Field]

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Craig Daters wrote:

> Martin Hepworth wrote:
>
>> Craig
>>
>> I do the entire outside email traffic.
>>
>> tar it up after three days, then manually burnt to CD once I get enough
>> to fit onto a CD.
>>
>> If you make the "Archive Mail = users.rule" you can populate the rule
>> file with the users you want to archive.
>>
>> I then have a script that's called by cron to tar.gz up the
>> directories..
>>
>>
> Thanks Martin,
>
> This gives me an idea of how to start a backup script. I do not want to
> back up all of it, as this would be to big. I only want to back up like
> 4 or 5 users email is all. Then be able to restore it somewhere to be
> able to find a particular message, preferably from a windows machine as
> no one other than myself knows how to use Linux....
>
Use a ruleset to only archive the mail for a few users, and archive each
of them into a separate mbox file. See the comment above the "Archive
Mail" setting for info on this. An mbox file is, more or less, a plain
old text file containing all the messages archived into that file. If
you back these up into a .tgz file somewhere, your Windows staff can use
Winzip to open up the archive and then use any old text editor (or even
Word if they must!) and search the text file for relevant
keywords/dates/whatever.

The Windows users will have to get used to seeing the full headers of
each message, but they will soon get used to it. And it's enormously
easier and faster to search than most other ways of hunting through
messages in a large mailbox.

--
Julian Field
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