Hello,
I try to create some kind of mail backup system. What I need is system
that will store mail for the whole domain, and allow me to restore
messages from/to specified email at that domain.
The scheme is pretty simple: on our main mail server the SMTP server
itself has a rule to send a copy of every message to
'bac...@backupserver.host', and the backupserver.host domain is placed
nearby on second server.
The SMTP on second server do simple 'catchall' redirect of all messages
to the single box. There is also a Dovecot that takes care for remote
IMAP access to that box. And, finally, I've create some scripts to sort
all messages in INBOX to folders named after message's date.
So I have a lot of mailboxes inside the catchall box:
INBOX
2011.11.03
2011.11.04
2011.11.05
2011.11.06
...etc...
and each folder holds messages for that day. Simply, and works perfectly.
The problem is that when my archive become big (several years), it
appears to be painful to find specified message(s). When someone
suddenly needs to find his/her old message, it is mostly guesses like 'I
think the message was between june and july of 2009, or maybe month or
two before that', so I need to search all mailboxes (with 1000's
messages in each). And it takes really long time.
I tried to play with Dovecot indexes, but it won't help too much. The
bad part is that I need to search for all emails in each message
headers, not only for "From" or "To", since some messages are sent to
maillists soe "To" = list address, not person's personal email.
Then I tried to index messages on my own, storing info on emails into
MySQL database ('email' -> 'mailbox', 'message filename'), but soon I
find out that message files can be renamed by Dovecot.
Could you please advice me how to speed up message search?
Sorry for such a long question, hope you can help!
Yours,
Alexander Chekalin
