dovecot - Feb 2011 - Separate access to different "folders" of the same mailbox?

Hello Timo and everyone,

I think on such an idea that may save me a bit of space and time:

in my company we have a mailbox that holds a copy of every message that 
our SMTP processed. While it eats a lot of space, it saved us several 
times when, you may imaging, user "suddenly" deleted the most
important
message in his life and call our IT guys for help. The mailbox contains 
"folders" for each day (like 2011-02-10), which keeps mailings for
that
day only.

Even with this, it is sometime hard to work with that "keep all" box 
(basically, it is slow as the size is huge). What I'd like to add is 
some kind of "virtual folders" (for each of our internal users) that 
list messages from and to his address. And I'd like to permit every user 
to see (that is, read only mode) only "his" such a virtual folder in
our
"keep all" box, so user can see his old messages on his own.

Looks like
1) I need an ACL to limit user access to "their" folders and somehow 
hide other folders at all
2) Have such virtual folders work with huge ammount of mailings (kind of 
300 Gb), separated in maybe 1000 folders (per days). I really afraid it 
will be slo-o-o-ow search, even with indexes (I mean, virtual folder 
that is defined as search over 1000 folders will be not that fast).

The mailbox is maildir by nature. How can I archive these goals with 
smallest load possible, and if it is possible at all?

Thank you,
   Alexander Chekalin

On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 09:15:18 +0200
Alexander Chekalin <achekalin at lazurit.com> wrote:
> in my company we have a mailbox that holds a copy of every message
> that our SMTP processed. While it eats a lot of space, it saved us
> several times when, you may imaging, user "suddenly" deleted the
most
> important message in his life and call our IT guys for help. The
> mailbox contains "folders" for each day (like 2011-02-10), which
> keeps mailings for that day only.
[...]

What you are describing is basically a standard mail
archiving service. Instead of building this yourself you
could look at existing software tools that include the features you
describe and offer additional functionality like attachment indexing,
signed archives etc. For example Mailarchiva (mailarchiva.com) -
There is an open source version as well
( http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmailarchiva/ ) 
Google lists various other alternatives.

HTH

Regards,
 Oli

Am 10.02.2011 08:15, schrieb Alexander Chekalin:
> Hello Timo and everyone,
> 
> I think on such an idea that may save me a bit of space and time:
> 
> in my company we have a mailbox that holds a copy of every message that
> our SMTP processed. While it eats a lot of space, it saved us several
> times when, you may imaging, user "suddenly" deleted the most
important
> message in his life and call our IT guys for help. The mailbox contains
> "folders" for each day (like 2011-02-10), which keeps mailings
for that
> day only.
> 
> Even with this, it is sometime hard to work with that "keep all"
box
> (basically, it is slow as the size is huge). What I'd like to add is
> some kind of "virtual folders" (for each of our internal users)
that
> list messages from and to his address. And I'd like to permit every
user
> to see (that is, read only mode) only "his" such a virtual folder
in our
> "keep all" box, so user can see his old messages on his own.
> 
> Looks like
> 1) I need an ACL to limit user access to "their" folders and
somehow
> hide other folders at all
you could use a hidden namesspace perhaps
> 2) Have such virtual folders work with huge ammount of mailings (kind of
> 300 Gb), separated in maybe 1000 folders (per days). I really afraid it
> will be slo-o-o-ow search, even with indexes (I mean, virtual folder
> that is defined as search over 1000 folders will be not that fast).
> 
> The mailbox is maildir by nature. How can I archive these goals with
> smallest load possible, and if it is possible at all?
> 
> Thank you,
>   Alexander Chekalin
i think you need mail archive system seperated from you daily mail store
( cause of your large archives )
and for that there many solutions possible, in germany for business
you have to keep business relevant mails by law for 10 years, with fast
search and not changeable,
so in real world this law is such nonsense, its not wide implemented yet
but as times goes by ,companies want/must implement this ( but who knows
what is business relevant mail so they simply store every mail), so
whatever you dont have to care about german laws, but you could use one
of this archive systems, some of them are open source styled, a few of
them go into private clouds
you may choose one which fits best to your infrastucture
-- 
Best Regards

MfG Robert Schetterer

Germany/Munich/Bavaria

On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 09:15 +0200, Alexander Chekalin wrote:
> in my company we have a mailbox that holds a copy of every message that 
> our SMTP processed. While it eats a lot of space, it saved us several 
> times when, you may imaging, user "suddenly" deleted the most
important
> message in his life and call our IT guys for help. The mailbox contains 
> "folders" for each day (like 2011-02-10), which keeps mailings
for that
> day only.
Besides the archiving options others mentioned, there's
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/Lazyexpunge