A few days before my birthday, Doug wrote: > mail server and just added a generic rule to the sendmail config via a > milter that saved ALL mail to an archive file. We then used logrotate to > rotate and compress the file and gave it lots of space. > A nice side-effect of using the milter in this way is you got automatic > de-duplication as long as the sender used CC and To appropriately. The > splitting to mailboxes happened after the milter. People pay a lot for > this sort of deduplication, normally.
This sounds like a good, cheap, fast answer, but I have worries when it comes time to respond to an e-discovery request to find a particular needle in that haystack. Those things can be time-sensitive, and the courts are not particularly sensitive to "it's going to take a while to search the archives" when there was a commercial solution that could have been implemented if someone had been willing to pay for it. By the time you start adding indexing of messages, I think things might not be as cheap as they first appeared. I'm not saying it can't work, I'm just saying that the requirements are probably more complex than they appear. Also, Jo - it may be worth talking to compliance and legal (together) about the requirement to save "all" email. Some regulations require nearly-perpetual archiving of some email, but those archives are all discoverable in a dispute, so large archives of everything can actually increase an organization's risk, rather than decrease it. Legal and compliance should not try to make this a technology problem by saying "just save everything." They should come up with the subjects and populations for saving all email, and then establish a default retention period for everything else. Anything that doesn't explicitly need to be retained should be destroyed irrevocably, and on a regular basis. Big piles of data are like toxic waste. The larger they grow, and the longer they stay, the more chance something bad will happen because of them. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
