Automatic download of email

[Lyttek]

I've been looking for a (Windows) program that will download email without a user being logged on. Basically, what I'm wanting to accomplish is a cheap archiving system that uses MailScanner to catch all incoming and outgoing email and plop it into an account created for that purpose. That part's fine.

Now I need something that will pull that mail off the server and store it on a Win2003 server, again, without a user logging on and running a mail client.

[RickG]

Now I need something that will pull that mail off the server and store it on a Win2003 server, again, without a user logging on and running a mail client.

The question is in what format?

Will it eventually be opened in a standard mail client? You could always download the "raw" mailbox (such as /home/accountname/mail/accountdomain/username/inbox) ... or do you need it readable in some other fashion?

[Lyttek]

I'm open to all possibilities at this point, as it's the beginning of a project. In fact, I may even remove the "Windows" requirement if it turns out a good enough solution can be presented that can be implemented fairly cheaply on inexpensive hardware.

[adept2003]

In essence, all you need is to set up a rule that forwards a copy of all emails to another email account. Since the user won't be logging in, then its irrelevent whether the receiving email address is on a windows server, or *nix, isn't it?

[Lyttek]

True enough. But what I want to accomplish is to store the mail on the client's file server. I'd rather not setup a mail server there just for that

But essentially, yes, that's what I'm doing... forwarding all emails to another account. It's pulling them from that account onto their local server that I'm tackling.

[Lyttek]

Will it eventually be opened in a standard mail client? or do you need it readable in some other fashion?

Some fashion that makes it accessible, which leaves it pretty open. I like the capabilities that desktop search tools (such as Google's) present in searching mail, so a format that's compatible with that would be great.

[chirpy]

I can't remember whether MailScanner Archive stores in maildir or mbox format. IIRC and it uses mbox, then you should just need to find a windows client that understand mbox and you should be able to just ftp the file up. Alternatively, you could append all the email from the mbox file into an existing inbox on the server and retrieve it as normal through that account.

[Lyttek]

I think what I'll end up doing is using MailScanner (installed by configserver.com, thanks Chirpy!) to copy incoming/outgoing email to another account, then using rsync to pull those messages down to a local server for actual storage.

What I'm not sure about now is the following from the MS config:

# Space-separated list of any combination of
# 1. email addresses to which mail should be forwarded,
# 2. directory names where you want mail to be stored,
# 3. file names (they must already exist!) to which mail will be appended
# in "mbox" format suitable for most Unix mail systems.

If I choose option 2, what format are they stored in? Does the format depend on whether or not MBOX or MAILDIR is used?

[Lyttek]

Ok, if you choose option 2, each message is stored as two files, one for headers, the other for data. So I guess that's considered a raw format, since it's not maildir or mbox?

And FYI, if you use the _DATE_ tag *anywhere* in the rules file, it forces the archive to use the above format, and places them in a directory named to the current date in yyyymmdd format.

It would have been more useful if the _DATE_ would work as just supplying the date, so you could name a file yyyymmdd.mbox or whatever. No joy there.

Also, make sure permissions are set correctly.