how to deal with mail retention/archival.

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2016-08-26 at 12:11 -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III via Info-cyrus
wrote:
> > > > > > "GR(" == Giuseppe Ravasio (LU) via Info-cyrus <
> > > > > > info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
> GR(> I saw that someone proposed to make a sort of abuse of delayed
> GR(> expunge, but I think that in order to comply with regulatory
> GR(> retention should be better considering some specific software.
> True, but it seems odd (to me, in a situation where I don't have
> infinite money) to have basically two mail servers: one which
> actually
> removes things when the user deletes stuff and one which doesn't.

But that is essentially archival - on-the-same-system is not archival. 
 It is also, potentially, still available to be easily changed;  which
is not good when the intent is retention.

> I guess they can be optimized for different things, but it still 
> seems odd when we already have a server that can store as much mail 
> as you want, provides a means to access and search it with ACLs for 
> auditors and such, and of course is already installed and running.

Do you want to give auditors access to your production systems?  
Generally I want to give them the qualifying information and have them
go away.

> If it were possible to hook the message deletion functions in cyrus 
> to move things to a different place in the hierarchy and then control
> expiry on those differently than the regular folders, it would 
> probably be sufficient.  But that requires code and I don't have the 
> skills to write it.

What you are talking about is "tiered storage".  That has been talked
about in the past - I don't know if anyone has implemented it.

> Certainly not super featureful but frankly
> when the lawyers want something, I just dump mail files on them and 
> let them sort it out.

Exactly!  So perhaps just dump them out of the system in the first
place.


-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam at whitemice.org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA