We are starting to evaluate Zimbra as our new mail client/server:
http://www.zimbra.com
(and it looks pretty nice). One unfortunate limitation, however, is
that they have a hard 5MB limit on the size of e-mail messages (since
they are stored in a database, not the filesystem). As much as I'd like
to enforce that kind of limit here, I haven't found a new job yet, so
I'd rather not be fired after the massive user revolt.
I am considering writing a post-data plugin to strip large attachments
out and put them on some sort of shared site (HTTP or FTP), and replace
the file in the message with a link to the file. Whatever I write will
also have to work against the existing messages (in Maildir format)
prior to uploading to the Zimbra server (I've already had one test
user's transfer keel over with "Out of memory" from this).
My questions are these:
1) Does this seem like a sane way to deal with it?
2) Does anyone know of an open source shared folder program (that I can
run inhouse) that doesn't come with too much other baggage?
That second question is critical, since the last time I tried to write
something like this, I got bogged down in design questions. I wanted to
be able to provide an interface where someone internal could send a link
to an external user which could be used to retrieve/save large files (on
a onetime or ongoing basis), as well as make it easy for internal users
to just share files. Oh, and it has to be secure (i.e. no easily
guessed filenames or directory structure).
I have the advantage that all of our internal users have their own
custom-issued client certs and many of the external clients have them
too (for a custom report app). So I don't have the nightmare of dealing
with passwords (at least not so much).
John
