[BlueOnyx:04091] Re: Couple of questions...

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Darrell,

> 1. Michael, what do you think about replacing Majordomo with Mailman in the
> BX core?  Is that something you may tackle in the future?  Does anyone
> offer a paid BX Mailman package?

I have a procedure for installing Mailman on BlueOnyx, which is also posted to 
the list. Can't find the topic now, but it's doable. As for making Mailman the 
standard mailing list software on BlueOnyx (or providing it in conjunction 
with Majordomo to retain compatability) ... yeah, it is on my wish list. But 
I'll not make any promises about when that'll happen. It's quite a stretch to 
cobble the GUI integration for that together.

> 2. I use several computers to perform work tasks every week, at least two,
> sometimes four.  Currently, I have six POP email accounts that involve
> personal, real job and third-party business related email.  I have always
> used POP email because I wanted to keep a local copy of the email (for
> whatever delusional reasons), and tend to store some email indefinitely.
> What is bothersome is having multiple email clients get the "new" mail
> every time they are started, and having sent mail on one computer when you
> use another.  How can I migrate to IMAP to resolve these issues?  What is
> the best method?

Dovecot provides both an POP3 and IMAP interface to the same mailboxes. So you 
can use either of those two protocols to access any given mailbox. It's just a 
matter of configuring your mailclient accordingly to use IMAP instead of POP3.

Having said that I should also point out that I don't find this very 
economically. Let me put it this way: I have a Linux workstation from which I 
do all my business related work with. The last 10 years or so I used KMail as 
mailclient and I also use POP3 to download all mails from about 20 different 
email accounts. KMail stores all mails in maildir format on that workstation, 
which is a kinda universal format that allows me to read the mails with any 
mailclient (local or remote) if I wanted to. I pretty much have like all 
emails from 10 years (including several high volume mailing lists) in it. 
That's probably more than half a million mails. 

On a workstation that's fine, but generally I don't really advocate to leave 
mails on a servers inbox indefinitely. Expecially if the mailboxes are in mbox 
format (default on BlueOnyx) this means the mailboxes are a single file and 
that will grow rather large pretty quick. And every time a mail arrives, the 
local delivery agent (Procmail) will have to open the entire mbox file to be 
able to append the new mail at the end of this file. That can create quite 
some strain once the mbox file is several gigabytes large. Now if enough 
customers do this on the same box, then you'll notice that performance impact. 
Also, there can be corruptions of the mbox file, which might result in a loss 
of all (or a considerable part) of the stored emails. That may happen only 
once every couple of years, but if that prompts you to loose thousands of old 
emails, then it could be something rather "thrilling".

We all have a "physical" mailbox in our front porch or screwed onto the wall 
of our houses. Typically we wouldn't keep mails in there indefenitely either, 
right? :o)

So if you're looking for ways to manage and permanently store your emails 
(even from multiple mailboxes) in an application designed for it, then you 
should probably look elsewhere. Something like OTRS (see http://www.otrs.org) 
for example, which I also use on BlueOnyx.

It's an email ticket system that polls several mailboxes and stores the actual 
mails in a MySQL database. It provides a web based GUI interface with a lot of 
features, which easily allows you to manage your emails, to sort and organize 
them and to search through them. It is not the end to all means in that 
regards and its primary focus is not on archiving mails, but it does that job 
quite nicely as well.

There are other applications available with similar feature sets as well, or 
different ones, but which also allow you to store vast amounts of mails from 
various sources in way that don't rely on keeping the mails in your various 
inboxes. GroupOffice (PHP and MySQL driven groupware with a quite nice email 
application built into it) for example. Just to name another one that I have 
some experience with. What's best for you really depends on expected usage and 
what you want it to be able to do. But anything is better than keeping the 
mails on the servers inboxes for the long haul.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber