Archiving Emails from a Postfix Based Email Server

Revision as of 20:43, 17 June 2010 by Vivian (talk | contribs)

Please note: This tutorial only covers the specifics of archiving an email server based on the mail transfer agent Postfix. 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.

MailStore Server offers several ways to archive emails from an email 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 Postfix 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) is 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 Postfix 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) is 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 Incoming and Outgoing Emails Directly

To integrate MailStore into an email infrastructure build upon the Unix/Linux mail transfer agent Postfix, it is recommended to deliver all emails in copy into a second archiving mailbox. To achive this, it is required to make some changes to your Postfix configuration.

Set up an archiving mailbox

The easiest way to achieve a complete archiving of all emails, is creating an user and assign an email address like [email protected] to him. Now let Postfix deliver a copy of all emails to that address. You need to add

 always_bcc = [email protected] 

to your Posfix's main.cf.

To be able to put all emails into the corresponding user archives, MailStore needs to be configured to archive emails from that mailbox via the "IMAP multidrop" profile.

Important note: The email address [email protected] must not be assigned to any MailStore user.

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