Home Messages Index
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index

Re: email storage know-how needed

  • Subject: Re: email storage know-how needed
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:14:08 +0000
  • Newsgroups: uk.comp.os.linux
  • Organization: schestowitz.com / MCC / Manchester University
  • References: <pan.2006.03.15.09.27.12.259323@asandco.co.uk> <krRRf.1472$qH2.1285@newsfe4-win.ntli.net>
  • Reply-to: newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • User-agent: KNode/0.7.2
__/ [ buzzbomb ] on Wednesday 15 March 2006 09:50 \__

> Alan Secker wrote:
>> I'm considering moving from a conventional office set up to
>> a less-paper office. All incomings and outgoings scanned and
>> stored on some wonderful indexed retrieval system. One of
>> the sticking points are emails. Ours are all stored on individual
>> worker's boxes. All using thunderbird.


I am not sure that E-mail is the best way to go, but it should work
nontheless.

 
>> Does anyone know of a way to store them on a server or a way of
>> converting the format so that they can go into the main scanned
>> document pool for later retrieva?


If you ever seek to index the data for fetching, have a look at this tool
that I recently came across:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7771


> I'd suggest a server based mailstore. There are many available, but as
> your users are already using Thunderbird I would suggest something that
> supports IMAP.


The alternative is of course POP3 without purging of messages after
retrieval. In due time this suffers from lag though.


> Options include Cyrus, Courier or Dovecot.
> 
>  From your description I'm assuming thunderbird collects each users
> email from a POP3 mailbox. If this is the case you'll need to change
> this so that the server collects the email and delivers it to the users
> server mailbox. This can be done with fetchmail.
> 
> You will also need a Mail Transport Agent (MTA). This takes care of
> moving mail around. Possibles are Postfix, Courier or Sendmail.
> 
> This will create a situation where your users email is stored on the
> server. What they get through Thunderbird is a view or copy of their
> mailbox. This has the advantage that other tools, such as webmail, can
> be used to access email.


I suppose that a different approach altogether would involve putting the
Local Folders (for POP3) of Thunderbird on a network filestore. All the
employees are then retaining a lightweight, network-dependent pool of mail,
which is accessible from outside, cohesively.


> The Postfix MTA has a useful feature that all mail passing through it
> can be sent to an archive mailbox. Your could use this feature to make
> sure a copy of all email is sent to your document pool. Alternatively,
> you could setup sharing on the users mailboxes and access them though IMAP.


Buzzbomb made excellent suggestions, too. My only intent was to list
alternative routes, which are not necessarily better.

Hope it helps,

Roy

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Author IndexDate IndexThread Index