Topic: Hold User Emails

[Mark Adams]

Is there any mechanism available that will allow me to place a "hold" on a users outgoing emails that will allow the administrator to review them before they are released?

Regards
Mark

[Ray Mitchell]

Mark
It would not appear easy to do but is possible. The complexities and ramifications of having a non standrad system may deter you though.See
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=15141.msg58136#msg58136

Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Kelvin]

Actually, I was more concerned with just archiving / having an audit trail, not to hold the mail for review.

I managed to get a sort of working solution (not perfect) for what I want but I would have liked qmail itself to do this. Because of some (dare I say it) silly / stupid / idiotic (take your pick, append your own) legal restriction, Mitel cannot simply enable the option to keep a copy of all outgoing mails (only requires modifying one line of a particular source file before compiling) even though it is a popular request. In my opinion, pathetic. We are not talking about adding or modifying code of our own here but setting an option as given on qmail's own FAQ !

Kelvin

[Mark Adams]

Ray Mitchell wrote:
>
> Mark
> It would not appear easy to do but is possible. The
> complexities and ramifications of having a non standrad
> system may deter you though.See
> http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=15141.msg58136#msg58136
>

Thanks Ray, but that doesn't appear to do what I want.  That talks about modifying qmail to save a copy of each message.

I want to physically stop the email from being sent until it has been read and approved by the sys admin.

Sort of like a quarantine set up.  Does that make sense?

Regards

Mark

[John Blaze]

I know what you are trying to do and I have a definite solution for you. But before I even give it to you I want to know what type Big Brother Admin thing are you doing this for? Your users that bad at sending e-mail? You would think a good e-mail policy would be good enough. I have a few hundred users on my SME servers so that would drive me nuts to check every e-mail.

[Mark Adams]

John,

Sorry if you get this twice but my reply appeared to screw up last time so here we go again.

Basically I am not trying to be Big Brother to all the users, but I do want to check a few.  Basically some of the people here have access to data that cost many thousnads of pounds/dollars.  if one of these users decides to quit I want to be able to put their outgoing email in quarantine until it has been checked, so that they do not mail themselves (or anyone else) this data.

I can't just disconnect them from email as they would be unable to do their normal work, which they have to do up until the moment they finally go through the door.

We use Goldmine as (amongst other things) an email client so I have a full archive of all sent email anyway, it is just that finding out they have done this after the fact is not much good to me.

Ideally a check box in the server manager that says "Hold outgoing email for this user" would be my dream solution, but a bit much to ask I think.

Hope that helps explain.

Regards

Mark

[Dave Woodhouse]

Hi Mark, I had this 'issue' at a clients site recently, i.e. soon to be ex-employee sending out stuff they should not and I helped the client look at solutions, However, they were advised that here in the UK, it was/is a 'grey area' legally to intercept a employee's e-mail hower justified the reason unless the employee has agreed to this in a contract, terms and conditions etc.


I Guess it falls into a similar catagory as secretly video recording employee's or taping phone conversations, opening mail etc, but you also have to protect intellectual property!

We ended up 'telling' staff that we WOULD monitor ALL computer use in such a situation (and modified contracts to say so) to hopefully put them off.

I also pointed out the many other ways a user could 'hotmail' info out the door without you knowing much about it.

Dave