On Jan 29, 2007, at 8:46 AM, tsuraan wrote:
... [no client programs] have very good control over when emails are removed from the IMAP server. Our requirements (imposed by corporate legal...) are that the archiving machine not delete messages from the email server until _after_ they have been archived to tape, and that emails stay on the archiving machine's hard drives for a certain amount of time for quick retrieval. The volume of email is large enough that scheduled batch fetching is not feasible; fetching must be continuous, but tape archiving can't be. So, we need to be able to signal to the email client that it needs to delete a specific set of emails that it has fetched once the archiving is done.
Please forgive the (near)-hijack of this thread. My interests here are not directly technical but rather along the lines of "what is really the goal". The reason I ask is that this sounds painfully similar to things I'm hearing from my company's IT dept. who I suspect of overcomplicating things. I'm not saying that applies to your case, but the similarities are striking enough I'd like to explore them.
Do you know if this mandate from corporate legal is in support of Sarbanes-Oxley? I'm assuming so for the rest of this message. If not then please advise.
Unless I'm mistaken (and IANAL) the central crux of SoX is being able to trace the generation, modification and movement of data that relates to financial reporting and accounting. While it seems to me something of a stretch to claim that all email in and out of a company is of financial interest, let's say for the sake of argument that it is.
Even then, I'm left wondering how involving the email client adds value. Wouldn't the cleanest implementation of such an archiving system be at the SMTP boundary?
Consider an email server where all accepted inbound email (undelivered messages like unknown recipients and spam need not be archived) and all outbound email were additionally copied to a regularly archived mail spool. Wouldn't that provide a complete record of all email traffic?
Since such archiving would be completely independent of email retrieval I don't see why IMAP or POP need be involved at all. The email would be archived long before it is even available via IMAP.
Comments? -Mike _______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list [email protected] https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
