Topic: Email Archiving

[devtay]

I am curious how everyone archives email on their servers. I am not referring to using Thunderbird or Outlook to make additional PST files, etc. I mean from a server admin side of things, how do you keep reasonably easily searchable archives of the email through the server?

What I do is what is described here: http://wiki.contribs.org/Email#Keep_a_copy_of_all_emails. I have a logger account and every email sent or received goes into that account. I use an email client to IMAP connect to the logger account and sort the mail to a folder for the current month (ie jan 2009). That enables me to go back to that time frame and look at the emails there. What I am worried about is the amount of storage that is now amassed on my server holding these emails. I think there has to be a better way. Any input is appreciated.

[janet]

devtay

If you need real time access, then upgrade your hard disk to a bigger one.
There's no magic answer to storing more data in less space.

If you just need to access them whenever (without urgency), then back them up (compressed of course) to DVD or external hard drive and then delete them from the server.

[shawnbishop]

Hi

Try using MailArchiva..open source and how to on the Wiki

[devtay]

shawnbishop,

Thanks for bringing this up. I found out about it a little after I posted this question. I actually downloaded and installed the windows version to play with. It seems to chat with my test account without issue. The config was a little more than I thought but now I have the experience. The only problem I had was it is a memory hog in the windows environment. I would hate to put this on my production SME Server (I don't have a test server here) and have it basically shut down when this program starts.

I believe the FAQ said MailArchiva likes a 3 gig Xeon processor. That was for windows though. I have a 2.4Ghz P4 with 1 Gig RAM running on my SME Server now. We only have about 50 mailboxes so it seems to be OK. I have never seen it go above 10% on the processor when I have been looking at top in the shell.

Thanks for the help. Do you currently use MailArchiva?

[shawnbishop]

Hi

I am using it in a windows environment, and SME environment...

I have found it easy to configure and use once you have done a it a few times, and the customer love being able to recover mail easily, especially in the Insurance industry where they are required to keep copies of all mail

Great product and should work on your configuration, 50 mail boxes is not alot, I have it working on a SME server with 900 users  with SMTP / POP from 6 different countries around the world., and that machine is busy, about 90GB of mail a month ( Dual Core 2.6 with 2GB RAM and 250GB HDD, the archiving is done to external drives.)

Cheers

[devtay]

Great product and should work on your configuration, 50 mail boxes is not alot, I have it working on a SME server with 900 users  with SMTP / POP from 6 different countries around the world., and that machine is busy, about 90GB of mail a month ( Dual Core 2.6 with 2GB RAM and 250GB HDD, the archiving is done to external drives.)

Cheers

That really puts things in perspective. I was planning an email server upgrade, but I would probably just be able to use an older box I have here with SME on it as the MailArchiva archive server. I have two years of mail on my SME mail server now and it is about 35 Gig. I just did a fresh install and am going to have to work out the logistics. I am thinking about just making a logger account on my new "server" and using the email panel to setup POP3 to my main mail server. It looks like the MailArchiva default uses localhost as a mail source. The good thing about it is I can mess around with it and if I screw something up, just do a re-install and restore on the new box.

Thanks for chatting. It sure helps to talk to someone that has been there and done that.

[devtay]

Ok, so I am trying to get mailarchiva up and running on my SME box. I went through the instructions on the wiki entry (I didn't have tomcat so I followed those instructions). When I try to connect to the server on port 8090, I get a page load error saying that my browser can't connect on that port. I did the instructions exactly except I used the newer version of the mailarchiva OSE files (1.9.6). Also, I went back and checked the sme server specific settings and did a config show mailarchiva and got this back:

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mailarchiva=service
    TCPPort=8090
    access=private
    status=enabled

Next I looked at the ln command and went to /etc/rc.d/rc7.d/ and the S99mailarchiva file is there.

I did a chkconfig --list and don't see a mailarchiva service listed.

I am using a brand new installation of SME 7.4 fully updated. There are only two users on the system (admin and maillog) and no extra contribs installed.

I can connect to the server-manager and to the default page on the server. I checked the messages log and see the normal sort of stuff in there (services restarting, expand actions, smb getpeername errors, etc.). I checked the httpd/access.log and see where I have been accessing the server manager and also this entry:

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192.168.2.161 - - [09/May/2009:08:02:13 -0500] "GET /server-manager HTTP/1.1" 302 218 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8"
192.168.2.161 - - [09/May/2009:08:02:13 -0500] "GET /server-manager HTTP/1.1" 307 285 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8"

There is nothing in the httpd/error_log other than the warning that I don't have a favicon.ico file in the primary ibay. Do I need to open up a port on the firewall to access 8090? Maybe I am missing the java files? The non-tomcat installation went off without a hitch and didn't give me any warnings. I allocated 1000m to the heap during install. Any help would be appreciated.

[Franco]

Hi,
Mailarchiva uses it's own webserver, hence the reason why you have no logs on the smeserver httdp.
Also there's no reason to open the firewall.
I'm also running the latest version of SME and Mailarchiva is working just fine.
what does

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ps aux | grep mailarchiva return?

[devtay]

Thanks for the reply and the clarification. Here is the output of ps aux | grep mailarchiva.

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root       954  0.0  0.0  4632  556 pts/0    S+   09:37   0:00 grep mailarchiva


[Franco]

It's not running 
But that you already knew!

Can you force the start by

Code: [Select]

/etc/init.d/mailarchiva startThen check again if it's running?

The logs are here:

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/usr/local/mailarchiva/server/logs

[devtay]

Now we are on the track of the problem. Thanks for the help. Here is what I get.

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-bash: /etc/init.d/mailarchiva: No such file or directory
I have /etc/init.d/ but no mailarchiva. I looked at the other ln command (from the install instructions on the wiki) directories and they are there. I did know it wasn't running, but not how to start it. Sometimes I have to use the /etc/init.d and sometimes svc -option to get things reloaded on SME server. Confused as to when to use each. I guess you can tell I am low on the totem pole of Linux admins. 

[Stefano]

Next I looked at the ln command and went to /etc/rc.d/rc7.d/ and the S99mailarchiva file is there.

it's a symbolic link.. to which file?

Ciao
Stefano

[devtay]

it's a symbolic link.. to which file?

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ln -s /etc/rc.d/init.d/e-smith-service /etc/rc.d/rc7.d/S99mailarchiva
Both of the files in the ln command are there. I just don't have anything at /etc/init.d/mailarchiva. This is the command I typed from the install wiki.

[Stefano]

try

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service mailarchiva start

it should work

Ciao
Stefano

[devtay]

Here is what I got:

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[root@mailarchive ~]# service mailarchiva start
/etc/rc7.d/S99mailarchiva: Couldn't find/execute init script for service mailarchiva

I looked at the scrip (S99mailarchiva) and it is looking for /etc/rc.d/init.d/supervise/$SERVICE where $SERVICE is a long string beginning with basename. I don't know what basename is but it seems like that is the problem. I need to read through the script some more with my perl reference to understand more of it. Looking...