Re: [exim] Archiving Email

Joseph wrote:
> Sander Smeenk wrote:
>> Quoting Joseph (lists@???):
>>
>>> 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.
>> Thing is, to get a specific message i have to know the exact maildir
>> filename or i have to untar the complete archive and go from there...
>> Which isn't all that bad if you are talking about your private mailsetup
>> with a couple of mailinglists, but company wide this can be a real pain.
>>
>> With mbox format you can usually just zless or zgrep through the gzipped
>> mbox. Even cooler, mutt is able to read gzipped mboxes!. Mbox can easily
>> be searched through with numerous tools from the cli too...
>>
>> So i'd say... Go for mbox format :-)
>>
>
> Thanks for all the comments.
>
> The format I am using is neither maildir or mbox, but just plain files.
> Which means I have to use grep to do anything with them.
>
> One thing that bothers me, is how I would get to the attachments, if
> need be. A person would need a perl mime tool or something to break them
> out.
>
> I like the idea of tar'ing them up every day or week and saving the disk
> space.
>
> I always have been leery of mbox, because if it gets corrupted, than you
> are in trouble although that should not really happen with todays file
> systems.
>
> regards, Joseph
>
>


A little off-topic from the original, but what methods are people using
to even begin archiving e-mails?
I've read into the Exim specification on unseen deliveries, but I don't
know if it will archive local deliveries (ones that are user to user on
the same system).
It also seemed a bit cumbersome to build maps of user's to archive, but
maybe theres a way to specify lists of entire domains to archive
(to/from a certain domain maybe)
Any hints on that aspect of archiving?

Regards;

Brent Jones