Archiving old email?

[Bron Gondwana]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2015, at 04:22, Patrick Goetz via Info-cyrus wrote:
> I have some users whose mail folders are approaching 2GB in size. 
> Unfortunately they can't delete any of this mail, but that doesn't mean 
> that it needs to be lugged around, indexed, and copied to local mail 
> caches as part of a live mail system.  I find that the probability of 
> needing to look at mail more than 5 years old is roughly 0%/year.
> 
> I was going to ask if anyone had any ideas about archiving old mail, but 
> then noticed that cyrus 3.0 is going to support some kind of archiving 
> system:
> 
>    Archive support has arrived! Requires addition of an archive 
> partition. (See archive_* options in imapd.conf)
> 
> Can anyone elaborate on what this actually means?

Each mailbox can have its storage split between two drives - one that's
high speed with recent mail, and slower speed drives for bulk storage.

At FastMail, we store the current week's email on SSDs in RAID1, and the
remainder (almost all of it!) on big SATA drives in RAID6.

There are potential plans to switch to using an object store rather than
the RAID6, if we can make it stable enough - we can reduce the number
of copies required without reducing the safety/redundancy - which is
always nice for managing costs.

Bron.

-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  brong at fastmail.fm