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Mail archiving

copymaster
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
hi everybody,

I am using Alfresco on an ubuntu edgy system. Now i implemented the Mail-proxy into my mailserver. Every incoming is going through this proxy and is automatically transferred to alfresco via api.

therefor i have an space called, say, "mail". the plugin checks, if there is a folder for the mailadress, if not, it is generated and the mail is copied there.

Now my question:
Because of german GdPdU and Basel II every company has to put email in an archiv, where the mail is stored for 10 years minimum.

well, the mails are put into the archiv, but without any security. Every user, who has access to that folder is able to read every mail. beside that, the amount of mails can easyly blast the capacity of the harddisk within a few weeks.

is there a possibillity to add enhanced security for this folder? for example to set a additional passwort, so that you need two persons with different passwords to access that folder?

Or, quiet a bit more complex, is it possible to write a extension or addon, so that all mails are zipped or decrypted with a certifikate without loosing the fulltext indexing?

if  there is such a possibillity, alfresco would be the ideal Mail archiving soultion.

But i don't know how to start or how to implement it. Please tell me your opinion about that.

thanx in advance,

alex
6 REPLIES 6

alexander
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Greetings

There are several things that you can do.

1) For compression, you can a) use compressed volume / device to store content (mount it under alf_data/contentstore). It will be transparent to alfresco, so fully indexed. b) Implement custom ContentService (see http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=952)

2) For security, if I understand correctly, you want to set different permissions on different items. For this you need a way to co-relate mail and users. You may want to parse "To" field and move mail to appropriate folder. This can be done using rules, but does not seem to be straightforward.

Other way would be to use existing system in Java, that can parse mail and use alfresco API to store it. I was doing some exercises on Zimbra - Alfresco integration, and it seems doable.

Thanks
Alexander

copymaster
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Well thanks a lot for your post.

unfortunately i am not a java coder and i just bought several books to learn about it.

is it right that you can zip a content (mail in .eml format) without loosing full text indexing? if so, thats all i need.

I do not know how to program own rules for alfresco. My idea is to define such a rule, so that every incoming content in this folder is zipped after the fulltext indexing, so that searching is still possible.

The mails are automatically stored within a defined space in folders for every user. this is done by an alfresco extension wich comes with the proxy. this extension creates folders for every mailadress that isn't already there.

In additional work you can add a routine for zipping with passwords or so.

But i am not a java programmer and i don't know how to implement own rules.


I don't know where to start. Is someone interested helping me with this problem?

I think creating this rule can't be difficult for someone who knows about alfresco and java. Maybe this rule is a good extension and can be included in the standard distri.

maybe i know enough about java in a few weeks to implement it myself, but actually i don't know how to start.

alexander
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
I think good idea may be to create Alfresco Forge project "Mail Archiving Filter (or Proxy)" and post there your initial code and requirements.

copymaster
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
as i said before, the proxy plugin is ready!

I use it several days now. it contains an alfresco plugin and a standalone proxy programm.

the mail is passed from the mailserver direktly to the proxy, which pumps the mail via alfresco api into the archive. by that way the proxy looks for the mail recipient and creates a folder if it doesen't exist.

Now what i need is a independent thing beside that. i only want to create a alfresco content rule that compresses all incoming content without loosing the lucene indexing.

i just want to know if such a rule is possible, maybe it is useful for other folders as well. and encryption of mails can also be done by the same rule.

maybe you can tell me, if it is possible to implement such a rule without loosing indexing AND where to start. i have no idea where to find a howto to write own rules.

thanx

peterh_nl
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
And then this thread dies?
Did anyone commence on this interesting subject?
Is this proxy-extension checkable/extendable somewhere in the forge?
It seems like an interesting topic to me and probably others?
Thnx for replies  Smiley Very Happy

cburghardt
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Well, the proxy is already there: http://www.inovox.de
The content is not compressed/decompressed on the fly but all emails are stored compressed if you enable this. And we are currently adding support for S/MIME encryption in the same way. We use content transformers that first decompress the content if the mimetype is known and then feed the email to the content reader.