Archiving emails with Cyrus

[Nik Conwell]

On Nov 24, 2008, at 10:36 AM, John Madden wrote:

> On Monday 24 November 2008 08:56:35 am Alexandros Gougousoudis wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Here's an idea I've been toying with for an upcoming implementation...
>
> Let's say you create everyone's Inbox/Drafts/etc mailboxes on your  
> reasonably
> fast (expensive/small?) storage with a relatively low mailbox  
> quota.  You
> then create user.username.archive on a separate Cyrus partition,  
> perhaps
> residing on SATA with a relatively high mailbox quota.  Inform your  
> users
> that to store mail and keep their Inbox available they should move  
> it there.
> You can then use Cyrus' built-in search mechanisms (squat) and have  
> to change
> very little.

I've been toying with the idea of replacing the cyrus routine(s?) that  
open/read the MESSAGE#. spool files with something that also  
understands gzipped data.  That way I can selectively gzip messages  
based on some algorithm involving message size and lack of activity.   
I haven't yet had the chance to do the analysis on the spool to see  
what sort of space gains I could expect.

Nik Conwell
Systems Programming
Boston University