[Dovecot] Archiving mail
Hi, I'm going to migrate my company-mailserver to new hardware. I would like to take the opportunity to archive some older mail. But I would like to have it still accessible, would this be possible with dovecot ? I mean, I would like to put that older mail from different users (I got about 50 users) on some read-only media but mount that media in the users mail-dirs. That way I will have less to backup after I backup that old mail and store it safely away. I can't convince my users to really clean up their mailboxes, so I backup more than 100GB mail while the total backup is a bit more than 300GB. Writing this I realise I could give each user a folder oldmail and symlink that to a read-only oldmail folder. Would this work ? I will have to find out how my backup-software can ignore the oldmail-folder. Thanks for any suggestions, Koenraad Lelong
Re: [Dovecot] Archiving mail
On 2013-07-18 14:14, Koenraad Lelong wrote: I'm going to migrate my company-mailserver to new hardware. I would like to take the opportunity to archive some older mail. But I would like to have it still accessible, would this be possible with dovecot ? I mean, I would like to put that older mail from different users (I got about 50 users) on some read-only media but mount that media in the users mail-dirs. That way I will have less to backup after I backup that old mail and store it safely away. I can't convince my users to really clean up their mailboxes, so I backup more than 100GB mail while the total backup is a bit more than 300GB. I cannot really answer your question, but seeing that the size of the backups is what triggers your question: We use Maildir as the mail format and our backups are done using rsync (rsnapshot, to be precise). This seems to scale reasonably well, i.e. rsync just copies those files which need to be copide, and rsnapshot creates hardlinks to previous backups as far as possible. So our nightly backups are actually fairly small, most of them consist of hardlinks to the next older backup we did. -- Frerich Raabe - ra...@froglogic.com www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing
Re: [Dovecot] Archiving mail
On Thursday, July 18, 2013 07:14 AM CDT, Koenraad Lelong dove...@ace-electronics.be wrote: Hi, I'm going to migrate my company-mailserver to new hardware. I would like to take the opportunity to archive some older mail. But I would like to have it still accessible, would this be possible with dovecot ? I mean, I would like to put that older mail from different users (I got about 50 users) on some read-only media but mount that media in the users mail-dirs. That way I will have less to backup after I backup that old mail and store it safely away. I can't convince my users to really clean up their mailboxes, so I backup more than 100GB mail while the total backup is a bit more than 300GB. Writing this I realise I could give each user a folder oldmail and symlink that to a read-only oldmail folder. Would this work ? I will have to find out how my backup-software can ignore the oldmail-folder. Thanks for any suggestions, Koenraad Lelong It sounds like you are looking for something similar to dbmail: www.dbmail.org. It will allow all the mail to still be readable by the end user but the archived mail will not be deletable or editable. We were looking at something like that but are probably going to end up going with something like enkive: http://www.enkive.org/ -- Donny B.
