On 23 Feb 2007, at 15:52, Joseph wrote:
> What is the preferred format for archived email?
> Archived being just a stored copy for potential legal reasons.
>
> One can use flat files or maildir etc...
>
> But since this email does not belong to anyone, I was thinking, how
> would be the best way to go about getting to this stuff in case it was
> needed.
>
> With flat files, your friend would be grep. With maildir you would
> need
> a mail client, which might be ok, unless we are talking hundreds of
> thousands of messages.
Actually I would have thought that grep is best on Maildir - you can
select out particular messages, whereas with mbox you get all
messages in that mbox if you get a match, so you have to grovel
within that mbox to further refine your search.
Looking at a mbox with many messages in it, might have legal
ramifications if you are searching personal data - you would need to
check this with appropriate local legal opinion.
mbox will be more space efficient - even more so if you compress them
(I keep an archive of my incoming mail in compressed mboxes - one per
day). Maildir will eat inodes if your filesystem has those. Beware
of directory size limits.
Or dump them into a big SQL database of some form - this is basically
write-only data so that seems very appropriate :-)
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
