Archiving rules

[Julien DELVECCHIO]

Hi,

I'm trying to import all my emails from Zimbra to Piler, but I want to use Piler to only access to my old emails (older than 3 years), so I only want to archive emails who are older than 3 years.

I thought I could do this with a archiving rule, then use a script with pilerimport from the Zimbra IMAP server, so only my old mails would be imported into Piler.

The thing is, in the archiving rules, I don't see the option to do this, can't I set up an archiving rule capable of using the date of the email ?

Thanks in advance,

Delvecchio Julien.

[Janos SUTO]

Hello,

I bet this is not what you really want, and it may not be as easy as it may seem. Normally you set up an always_bcc entry for postfix, and it will copy all emails to the archive. However there's no support (in piler) to discard a message based on its date. Btw. I don't think postfix will send an email to piler 3 years later for archival. So you have to copy somehow your emails (via scp, rsync, etc) to the archiving host, and import them manually by pilerimport.

Btw. why do you want to exclude current messages from piler?

[Julien DELVECCHIO]

Thanks for your quick answer.

Well we've got our Zimbra server containing 150+ users, and all of our messages are already on Zimbra, we just want to clean up a bit the Zimbra server and export the old mails on another server (we chose Piler), because our Zimbra server is holding a lot of data right now, and we need to free a bit of space.

All of the current/active messages are received on Zimbra and stocked on Zimbra, we just want Piler to be a server where we can have an easy access to our old mails.

So my goal right now is to export my emails from the Zimbra server and import them on Piler using the pilerimport command and the IMAP server. It would of been great if we could set up an archiving rule who is capable of discarding a mail based on its date, since the archiving rules are applied when we use pilerimport.

So I guess the solution is to export from Zimbra using a filter on the date since it isn't possible on Piler ?

[Janos SUTO]

You are right. If you still want this, then you don't need the piler smtp daemon, rather copy old emails to piler, then import them via a cron job or something. In this case the IMAP import won't help since piler has no support for filtering based on the date.

Btw. why don't you trust all emails to piler? I mean why not put all emails to piler? It can compress and dedup, so messages won't occupy that much disk space than on zimbra. Piler can store emails effectively, and recommend you to take this approach.

[Julien DELVECCHIO]

Well we don't see the point of storing the same emails on both servers, we are aware that Piler does a great work storing them, but in our case, it is not what we want it to do.

Like I said, we want Piler to store only old messages, we might have a think about using the smtp daemon and forwarding them all to Piler, but right now we don't need this since Zimbra does a good work, currently, we really want to separate these "active mails" from the "old" ones.

[Janos SUTO]

OK. Then stop the piler daemon (no need for running it), and copy old enough emails to the piler host where it can access and them.