Archiving emails with Cyrus

[Alexandros Gougousoudis]

Hi,

we use Cyrus 2.2 on a Debian Etch Linux with Sasl and Thunderbird as a
IMAP mailclient for our users. The problem is, that the mailboxes become
very big, so I look for an automatic archiving software, which takes the
mails out of the mailbox into a file and a searchable database.

Thunderbird offers the possibility to mark a mail with an editable
keyword (right mouseclick) even as a bulk operation on all selected emails.

So my plan is, that the user marks all mails which can be archived with
that keyword (lets say "archive"), or move them to a subfolder "archive".

There must be a process in cyrus, which copies these emails into a
(zip)-file and/or into a database, to have them somehow accessable.
Cyrus must do this with the administrator account, because the imap
credentials of all the users are of course not known to us. Or we
install an "archive"-useraccount which has access to all mailboxes.

Does something like this exist? Where to look for? Maybe Opensource?

Please give a hint

Thanks
  Alex