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.
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 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
As Sendmail is one of the most flexible mail transfer agent available there is no best practice available. It mainly depends on you environment how your want to create copies of all emails. The recommended way since Sendmail 8.10 is using the libmilter interface to add additional functionality to Sendmail.
A database of available Milter plugins is available at https://www.milter.org. There is also a section for archiving solutions. There are huge differences how those Milter plugins are implemented an work. Unfortunately it is up to you to find the most suitable match for you environment.
In any case, the main target should be having a copy of all email messages delivered to a single archiving mailbox including envelope headers. That mailbox must be accessible by IMAP to make use of MailStore Server's "IMAP Multidrop" profile.
