[Mimedefang] Archiving email

[Clayton, Nik [IT]]

> Ole Craig wrote:
> > Moreover, your phrasing of "political reasons" suggest that 
> things are
> > already to the point where somebody is unhappy,
> 
> If the "political" reasons are anything like a note I heard in last
> night's news, governments in several places are looking at *requiring*
> ISPs to archive all email to/from/within their systems.  Should that
> happen, it's probably still a good idea to note the fact in SMTP
> greetings or email headers...

For some things it's already a requirement.  SEC regs mandate that we
archive all Internet mail (in and out) for several years, and a fair
chunk of the internal mail as well.

> Ugh.  I work for a *small* ISP, and we process around 3G of mail per
> week (in/out/within).  That doesn't include our corporate 
> customers that
> host their own mailservers, or our domain hosting service.  We can't
> *afford* the disk space required to store that email...

We shift ~ 10G a week in and out (just Internet, that doesn't include
internal mail).

There are companies that specialise in doing exactly this sort of 
archiving.  Although the category says "Document Management", many of 
the companies at

http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Computers/Sof
tware/Business_Applications/Document_Management/

will archive e-mail as well.  Technically, this can be as simple as
silently adding an additional recipient to each in/outbound message of
something like

     my_company_name at company-that-does-my-archiving.com

and then company-that-does-my-archiving.com provides all the tools for
searching back through the archive, and have the headache of actually
storing all that data.

N
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