Archiving emails with Cyrus

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> 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.

Are you looking to archive message for data-retention or because you  
need to recover capacity?

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

Does that actually get saved to the server?  Or just in TB's cache?

> 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,

It should be trivial to write an IMAP tool that will archive messages.  
  I'm curious because I am currently working on a .NET/Gtk#  
application to do some management of Cyrus.  Currently it profiles a  
mailstore and creates a graph relating age of messages to storage  
space consumed.

> 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.

Recommend the second,  I try never to connect to the box as the cyrus  
account.  Just grant appropriate access to the appropriate resources.

> Does something like this exist? Where to look for?

Not to my knowledge.