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A Programmatically Accessible Email Archive?
JohnnyConatus asks: "Does anyone know of a service that offers corporate email archiving and also provides a read-only interface for accessing the archived emails programmatically? Ideally this would be in the form of an database connection or a web service. My current employer is required by the SEC to archive all email communication with clients and we would like to incorporate the archived emails into our internal applications. I have called just about every email archive service I could find via Google, and while most offer a web application to search the emails, none so far have a solution for doing so programmatically. For various reasons, archiving the emails ourselves is considered the last resort. If we had to implement archiving locally, a program that archived by acting as a mail gateway would be the ideal since we'll be supporting a wide-range of mail servers."
but it was a mail client where all the mail was stored in an SQL database.
the mail was POP'd in, and it went straight into an SQL database somewhere; it was actually very fast and very reliable.
Perhaps you could do something similar. SQL is pretty ubiquitous.
If all of the emails are stored in an imap account then you could access this programatically using PHP's Imap functions. I do the same thing using a cron job to check an email account every 5 minutes on my site, if theres a new mail it looks to see if it has an image attachment and if it has automatically posts it online for me.
Information about PHP's Imap functions can be found at http://uk.php.net/imap.
I'm not entirely sure if this is the kind've thing you are looking for, but this is probably how I would deal with the problem.
Regards,
Grant
Isee Stars Astro Image Hosting.
You said to did a google search but did you talk the the obvious choice. Google.
They seems to have something of a specialty in archiving e-mail and search technology and usually have some kind of API.
So, you are suggesting saving possible critical email at Geocities? Why didn't I think of that...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
How much mail does your company move per day? Thousand of messages? A gig in attachments per day?
You could very easily implement this as a simple forwarding daemon, or as an plugin to your existing MTA, just store all mail going anywhere in a separate, append-only mailbox, then use IMAP to access it remotely.
IMAP is an industry-proven protocol, there exist many open-source implementations, and has been specifically developed for situations where the mail will remain on the server. It provides you with searching and tagging, plus you can organize the mail store as you see fit (f.e. each years mails in a separate folder, while still able to search all of them at once) (sort known spam in a separate folder while keeping it around). Granted, I'm not aware of any IMAP server that uses an SQL back-end, so this may become a bottleneck for you.
So, you need to archive emails for an organization that has multiple flavors of mail servers, and you need the archive to be accessible by internally developed applications.
It sounds like you need all of your mail servers configured to dump incoming and outgoing messages to a database.
I don't do much mucking around with mail servers, so if they don't have any easy integration with databases, I'm sure you could have them log to a file, with a scheduled script that loads any logged messages into the database. This same script could of course do all of the log rotation \ cleanup required.
There are plenty of hosted solutions out there for this - but if you want to have the ability to query it from your internally developed applications... I would think that you would want the archive to be stored in-house.
The javamail api can do everything you need, and you can plug bouncycastle's api along with it so you have it PGP encrypted.
Write a Perl app to access the web server programmatically. This is pretty simple. The first time I used LWP, it was 15 minutes from the time I started searching CPAN, found, downloaded, and installed LWP, and had an app running which read a web form and POSTed the values we needed. It took another couple of days to polish it up, add in some error checking and consistency checking (did they change that web page on me?), etc, but LWP is very easy to use.
Infuriate left and right
http://www.dbmail.org/
/var/spool/mail with an SQL back-end. Things like MBOX or IMAP will suck for dealing with millions of records/messages, but SQL should handle it easily.
is one starting point, but there are a few others.
You're basically replacing
We have the same SEC requirements here and we use iLumen's Assentor products. The configuration was painful initially, but it's quite effective. Here's an article on the Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal. It stores ALL email and IMs and the contents and functionality can be made accessible via APIs or database calls.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that makes SOX compliance appliances.
The SEC requires you to keep all email in house. As far as we can tell that means your storage must be in house, not at a service provider.
We don't provide such an interface. In our products. We want as few possibilities for bugs where you can delete/alter email as we can. By sticking to our interface we have a better chance of keeping you from doing something illegal (which could reflect on us). However we do provide a web interface which a cleaver programmer can script.
If you use something other than Microsoft Exchange, you can set the always-cc option to send email to several users, one of which is the account our device polls from, and one is an account you can doing anything on. Frankly I prefer this option. We don't want you messing in our product for anything other than the compliance purposes we have designed as it may open us in court questions of if we are for compliance when we do those other things.
Yes we are paranoid, but there are some strong laws around on this subject, and right now regulators are looking for examples to prove they are doing their job.
EMC Centera for email storage. Its a CAM. You can find a couple of test Centeras on the 'net (but they will have data trashed periodically).
Will retain records pursuant to a number of different gov requirements for reporting.
Use Kasten Chase for encrypting, if needed (we have an object shim -- and this is a plug). That will give you your data security.
Maybe other solutions... but that's the one I am familiar with.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I came across this company in the past as a potential job opportunity. Sounds like they do exactly what you want, however I do believe their application is Windows specific (or it was at the time). They also offer IM archival using their client.
www.messagerite.com
$ man woman *
-bash:
I love SQL and relational databases myself, but what would be the point of using such a system in this case?
... I've had good success at archiving all my previous department's e-mails (actually, what we were calling "e-mail journals") using Zope and a tiny product on top of that called MailBoxer. Provides nice web-brouseable/searchable interface to the archives, and Zope can be extended via python to do what you want to do.
Paul B.
Shouldn't be that hard to slap a Java or PHP front-end on top of a SQL database to do what you want. I'd look at sourceforge[1,2] to see if someone's already built it.
[1] Sourceforge is owned by the same folks that own slashdot.
[2] I'm not affiliated with either, except as a user.
[Insert pithy quote here]
this? Veritas provides a CLI to all their other products, I'd be terribly surprised if this was an exception.
About two years ago I completed an in-house project that involved integrating sendmail (via pipes), PHP (for text handling), and MySQL, to archive all messages in a set of MySQL tables that can then be queried later. Separately, I have a web-based search and browsing system. If you're interested in using these tools to build out your email repository, you'll find my contact info at phpconsulting.com. It doesn't handle attachments very well, but that could be built out without too much hassle.
For what it's worth, if you're considering building something yourself, there are various advantages to not using mbox or maildir, but a truly relational structure for archiving the email.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I suggest a homegrown solution. If you primarily need to archive (but not search) emails then just use PostgreSQL (or MySQL i suppose).
If you'll need to search them, forget a database and use a Lucene index. You could also store all the text verbatim in lucene and forget the database.
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http://profitability.net/email-archiving-complianc e.html
Looks like that does exactly what you're looking for.
If your company is doing this for SEC compliancy (meaning Sorbanes-Oxeley) you really need to look into all that goes along with this.
You'll still need to provide security as to who can view messages. Search for legal purposed. You have document rentention scheduled you'll need to adhere to. You'll potentially have a freakin' huge volume of data to look it.
I'm seeing a lot of references to PHP and Java classes -- something as important as SEC regulations for e-mail archiving shouldn't just be thrown together willy-nilly. Failure to get it right could cause *huge* legal problems downstream.
Mail archiving for SEC/SOX is an utterly non-trivial undertaking.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You might want to contact Symantec about this. The primary reason they bought Veritas [and to a lesser degree Brightmail] was to make this sort of SEC mandated email archival setup.
Well, what about Google?
l
They have a indexing appliance as well as a Google API? That way your company can also keep all its indexed email in its own data center.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/features.htm
I'm not sure about your office, but my employer uses Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange servers. Microsoft Access can 'link' data from Microsoft Outlook data sources, and access the messages as records in a table. You can then run a query in MS Access to insert that data into another table on a proper database server, and then use any technology you like to access the data there.
If your employer doesn't use Microsoft Exchange servers, this advice won't really apply to you.
If you're a moderator and you want to ensure that people who use Microsoft products and submit Ask Slashdot questions never get useful answers, feel free to mod me down.
Courier has an optional "big-brother" mode that makes a copy of every email that passes through. It can be set up as an email gateway and has a flexible authentication and filtering mechanism with standard plugins for SQL, LDAP, PAM, and others.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
but what does the poster mean by 'programmatically accessible' email archive?
I'm betting you are using Exchange so, get some disks and learn some VBScript. TTFN
1 - Exchange 2003 has a DB interface
2 - There are 3rd party products that integrate with Exchange and provide everything you need for compliance in a nice pretty interface.
Check with Fox Technologies (formerly known as TFS Tech and TenFour). The TFS Gateway did multiple mail system integration and automatic e-mail retention way back in 1997 when I used to work there. They seem to be pushing SOX compliance pretty hard these days so give them a call.
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