suggestions for archiving and access to the archive

[Alex Neuman van der Hans]

Harondel J. Sibble wrote:
> 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, 
>   
If you use rulesets you can make several mbox files. "Subscribe" the 
IMAP user to these folders and you've got a working separate system, 
although you'll probably be archiving multiple copies of messages (say, 
a message for alice at yourdomain and for bob at yourdomain would probably get 
archived twice, or only alice's copy would, depending on your rulesets). 
You should also have a "catchall" rule at the end for when the messages 
are for users not on your ruleset that you may have forgotten about 
(weird aliases or whatever).
>
> My requirements
> 1) fast access to the live/online archive, could be up to several gb's in 
> size
>   
If you split by user (and whether it's incoming or outgoing), it's a 
whole lot faster. If you split by date, even more so (the .conf file has 
the ability to do this, IIRC).
> 2) ability to easily archive the archive file(s) to dvd to allow viewing on a 
> windows machine
>   
mkisofs -o backup.iso /home/archiveuser/mail/; cdrecord yadda yadda 
yadda... backup.iso
> 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
>
>   
Use mbox-purge (http://www.argon.org/~roderick/mbox-purge.html):

mbox-purge --eval 'time - delivery_time > 60*60*24 * 7' /var/mail/*

or something like that...




>
>   

-- 

Alex Neuman van der Hans
N&K Technology Consultants
Tel. +507 214-9002 - http://nkpanama.com/