suggestions for archiving and access to the archive

[Harondel J. Sibble]

Somewhat off topic...

Okay, using MS, I normally archive all in/out going email to a subfolder of 
/var/spool/MailScanner/archive using mbox format, however being able to read 
the archive or extract messages from it is a hassle, especially once the 
archive gets to say 3 or 4gb. Normally we try not to let it get that big, 
however depending on the number of mails that go through daily, it could 
easily get there quickly.  We archive weekly to dvd, and zero the archive 
file.

So using mbox, it makes it easy to backup the archive but a hassle to read 
the archive or resend email from the archive, not to mention the memory use 
when loading large mbox files.

Now, I know going with maildir, it would be easy to view the archive, 
especially over imap, but archiving it to dvd seems like it would be a bit 
more complicated, especially since many times viewing the archive is done 
away from the Mailscanner machine and usually on an MS Windows machine.  
We've found that using Thunderbird allows viewing the archive file "offline", 
again however dealing with large archive files is a pain.

I had hoped MailWatch would allow access to the archive, but no such luck.

Another option would be to use hypermail and extract the archives contents 
into an html directory structure and accessible via apache

So how are other people handling this kind of issue?

My setup
- Centos 4.2
- mailscanner and mailwatch
- dovecot (imaps only)


My requirements
1) fast access to the live/online archive, could be up to several gb's in 
size
2) ability to easily archive the archive file(s) to dvd to allow viewing on a 
windows machine
3) ability to easily empty/reset the archive file(s) on a set schedule, say 
once a week after they've been written to dvd



-- 
Harondel J. Sibble 
Sibble Computer Consulting
Creating solutions for the small business and home computer user.
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