Alan Fullmer put forth on 3/5/2011 6:16 PM: > I have looked into the bcc always option, but it seems to require it to > forward to an email address.
always_bcc is exactly what I would do, but with a twist. And it's possibly simpler than other suggestions. Use always_bcc to dump a copy of every mail to an address at the remote server you mentioned, say [email protected] Configure the mailbox backing that address as mbox format so every mail is simply appended to the end of the file. Make sure /var/mail, the default location for the mbox INBOX, is a partition/filesystem large enough to hold a week/month/year/etc worth of email. Then, weekly, monthly, yearly, whenever required, simply put your queue on hold, make a copy of that mbox file, then empty the live mbox file and restart the queue. I say empty it instead of delete/recreate as the latter may cause problems. A simple 'echo "" > /var/mail/mbox_file' should do the trick. Then do your parsing on the copy to another output file, zip the outfile up and burn it to DVD, or whatever WORM media you use. Remove the temp copy. Something like that anyway. This method removes the extra processing overhead required on your MX for each inbound mail as in Wietse's example, pushing the parsing load to the dedicated archiving machine. And by moving the parsing from a per delivery basis to a weekly/monthly/yearly/etc basis, you have an exact complete copy of every mail up to the point you archive it. This could come in handy for other uses. For example, instead of needing to go to a D2D or tape unit to restore and individual accidentally email you could simply forward the copy of the original from this archival mailbox. -- Stan
