What is the easiest way to automatically archive multiple IMAP accounts?

July 8, 2007 6:09 PM

What is the easiest way to automatically archive IMAP emails (incoming and outgoing) from multiple user accounts? Gmail doesn't handle IMAP and I don't have access to our school's server. We need a central location to archive our research projects emails. Mac, PC, or web method okay.
posted by philrj to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Depending on what your exact requirements are, there are a few ways you could do this, I think.

One way would be to set up a mailserver that acts as an intermediary. Rather than connecting directly to Gmail / their normal mailhost, users configure a desktop client and connect to the mailserver. It in turn connects to their outside mail accounts and downloads everything. It also handles sending, by acting as a "smarthost," taking in mail and sending it out to the regular mailserver (Google's SMTP server, etc.).

That would be complicated to set up but probably doable. You'd probably want to find someone who's a relative expert in mailserver configuration to make sure you don't screw anything up and lose people's email. I'm pretty sure you can configure something like that in Postfix or Exim, but it's beyond my personal capabilities.

Another, simpler way, if you don't need to record ALL email being sent in/out by your employees, is to set up a mailing list or "reflector" for project use. If your project is like most that I've been on, people are probably just manually entering lots of addresses into the "To" field on their messages, and then using the "Reply All" function extensively. Instead of this, you set up a listserv/reflector, get everyone on the project to join it, and then they can email the whole project team just by sending messages to a single address. Most listserv packages (GNU Mailman for one) produce archives that you can pour over with other tools, turn into web-accessible pages, etc.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:07 PM on July 8, 2007

I saw "archive" and "imap" and thought of IMAPsize - not exactly what you're asking for but might be a component in a strategy.
posted by yarrow at 6:58 AM on July 9, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks guys....really helpful. I'm wondering if just setting up Thunderbird on a dedicated computer in the office to collect and archive emails would do the trick? Is there an archive plugin for Thunderbird that might automatically do this?
posted by philrj at 1:59 PM on July 9, 2007