Re: [vchkpw] Archiving mail

[aichains]

Ken Jones wrote:
On Monday 25 October 2004 05:02 pm, Bill Gradwohl wrote:
I know this subject has been touched on several times on this and the
qmail list, but I have yet to see a comprehensive resolution, so please
bear with me.
Texas courts are now moving legal documents via email between the
respective attorney's offices, and attorneys are asking for a way to
archive everything in and out of a virtual domain as a permanent record.
The Subject: contains a case number.
SEC regulations as well as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) require those affected
by these rules to archive all inbound and outbound mail. qmail has a
rudimentary facility to do this with a patch to the extra.h file.  It
doesn't archive a duplicate of the mail, but simply ads an artificial CC
to it to force the rest of the system to send a modified copy of the
email to a specific location. That may or may not satisfy SEC or SOX
requirements - I don't know. One can argue that what the archive holds
was never sent to the server due to the CC modification.
When vpopmail is added to the mix, the promise of the extra.h patch
looses its usefulness as what most sites want/need is an archive per
virtual domain or even per user, not for the box as a whole. Its been
mentioned that maildrop can archive mail, but I believe it can only do
this for mail that eventually gets analyzed via a .qmail file. There is
no mechanism for mail sent out to be archived via maildrop. Please
correct me if I'm wrong.
Is there a comprehensive way to archive mail EXACTLY AS IT WAS SENT,
either in to the domain or out from the domain, IN A VPOPMAIL
ENVIRONMENT, on at least a virtual domain level? If so, how? Note -
recordio is not a solution.
Adding extra delivery instructions in the .qmail file for a user is less
than satisfactory especially since it will only archive a facsimile of
the mail and then only for mail send to the domain, completely missing
any mail originating on the domain destined for the outside world.

This might apply...
We did some work for a major banking institution. They needed to
satisfy the same type of archival problem. The queue extra change
to qmail creates an acceptable email for archiving. However, the
problem they needed solved was only some of the email that flowed
through the machine needed to be archived.
We create a qmail "queue tap" patch to:
1) Set the archival email address in a control file
2) Specify the list of emails to archive in a regex style control file.
They forwarded all the "tapped" emails to a remote machine that
burned all the emails to CD.
If anyone is interested in this "queue tap" patch I can put together
a patch file together for public distribution.
very interested.