Request for hints

[lnr]

As most of you know I work for the Engineering Dept of Cambridge University, mostly dealing with email related things. We have a bunch of people with a shared role account on hermes, the university mail system. They're using two different mailers to access it, and saving messages in IMAP folders. They're nearing quota, and want to archive old material in a format which is accessible (in particular) in both Outlook and Eudora. We have shared filespace, but could do with ideas as to how on earth to store this mail in a way that they can all access it.

So far it looks like the best answer is to continue to run our own IMAP server, so it can be used for such archives. We were hoping to run it down though. Hermes is hoping to provide larger quotas in future (currently at 250MB default, up to 1G, which this team are already allocated), but don't intend it to be used as an archive.

Will write at some point about a) sisters hen-night and b) moving house, but I'm a bit busy at work this week as a result of b) and will be at a course all next week, so it'll probably have to wait til we have internet at home. Suffice to say: thanks to all who helped, and we're very happy.

Comments

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I think an IMAP server is your best (and possibly only) option here. Even if you can find a format they'll both cope with i doubt they'd play nice about locking the file when doing anything to it.

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

Surely locking isn't an issue for a read-only archive. It looks like both Outlook and Eudora support .eml files so you could just spew all the emails into a directory full of those. No idea how you'd go about indexing the damn things though.

(S)

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

Are the clients going to be adding messages to the archive or is some other process going to be doing that? And indexing was my main concern as far as locking went.

I know Outlook can import eml files, but can it just treat them as a folder without having to manually import them?

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

It couldn't last time I looked (which was admittedly more than three years ago).

I think IMAP is the only solution.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

If it's just for reference / archive purposes, how about converting it to webpages?

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

That might work but... you need a separate search mechanism (which might not be a bad thing), you can't trivially forward an old email to people in another department (who don't have access to your web-pages, presumably), do you flatten everything out for the web-page. For example, I get things like "Hi, I've attached X." Followed by a 2 meg attachment of embedded nested emails. Then some comments afterwards. In Outlook, it shows up as a little icon, of course. Rich Text vs HTML vs Plain Text is another fun issue.

Not that I'm saying you're wrong. Just I can hear the screams from Outlook addicts in my head already.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

You're running an email system, not their personal library.
Tell them to build themselves a wiki and put it all in that. Give them a deadline at which you'll just delete the oldest N meg.

Or they could print it off and out it in a filing cabinet.

[lnr]

This is material which is less than 6 months old. And is for the office which runs personnel for the department for example. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to need to store more than 1GB of mail that they still need access to.

We're the fucking IT department, it's our job to provide the solutions for the secretaries, not to tell them to build their own wiki - they'd likely not have a clue what I meant, and it isn't a sensible way to store mail anyway.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Um, I almost think you thought I was serious

[lnr]

See my brain is too tired to cope right now.

[pm215]

This is material which is less than 6 months old.

That's pretty recent. I think the obvious thing would be to leave it all on hermes, it's got to be cheaper than increasing eng.dept workload. [I know it doesn't actually get accounted for like that, unfortunately.]

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on your new home by the way. I hope you'll be very very happy for ever after.