Archiving Emails from a Sendmail Based Email Server
Please note: This tutorial only covers the specifics of archiving an email server based on the mail transfer agent Sendmail. It is assumed that you already have a MailStore Server installation or test installation and are familiar with the fundamentals of MailStore Server. Please refer to the Manual or Quick Start Guide for more information.
MailStore Server offers several ways to archive emails from a Sendmail server, which are described below. If you are not sure which archiving method best suits your company, please refer to chapter Choosing the right archiving strategy.
Archiving Individual Mailboxes
Mail transfer agents such as Sendmail are only responsible for transporting emails and, when acting as mail delivery agent, for the delivery to local mailboxes. For accessing the emails in the mailboxes with MailStore, an IMAP- or POP3 service (called mail retrieval agent) must be installed and started on the email server. If access to the email server via the IMAP and/or POP3 protocol is possible, please refer to the corresponding chapter Archiving Server Mailboxes in the MailStore Server manual to set up the archiving process.
Archiving Multiple Mailboxes in One Step
Mail transfer agents such as Sendmail are only responsible for transporting emails and, when acting as mail delivery agent, for the delivery to local mailboxes. For accessing the emails in the mailboxes with MailStore, an IMAP- or POP3 service (called mail retrieval agent) has to be installed and started on the email server. If access to the email server via the IMAP protocol is possible, please refer to the corresponding chapter Batch Archiving of IMAP Mailboxes in the MailStore Server manual to set up the archiving process.
Archiving Incoming and Outgoing Emails Directly
When archiving emails during sending and receiving, it is recommended to have Sendmail, in addition to delivering the messages to their respective users, send a copy of all emails to an additional mailbox.
Because Sendmail is one of the most flexible mail transfer agent available, there is no best practice guide for setting up the functionality described above. How Sendmail is configured to send a copy of all emails to an additional mailbox largely depends on your system environment. Since Sendmail 8.10 it is recommended to use the libmilter interface to add features to Sendmail.
The main objective is to send copies of all emails - including envelope header - to an archiving mailbox which is accessible by IMAP.
Configure MailStore Server to archive this mailbox at regular intervals (e.g. daily at 11pm) using an archiving task of type IMAP Multidrop Mailbox.
After archiving, emails can and should be deleted from the archiving mailbox automatically by MailStore Server. The MailStore archiving task can be configured accordingly.
