general talk about email infrastructure

nass · 12-03-2010, 05:02 AM

Hello everyone,
I should warn you in advance that this is not a linux-specific matter. It's a broader IT discussion about email setup possibilities and specific questions about linux clients that offer the ideal functionality (if any exist).

In the office I work in I occasionally do some basic IT stuff. I don't work on IT full time and i'm not an IT professional. So far the way emails have been going in and out of the office has been mainly from 1 account info@myoffice.com. even though everyone has their own accounts too.
Why is that? well so that all emails are in one place when one needs to run a search. (The email applications is MS outlook with its monolithic emails file 'outlook.pst')

The thing is, no one uses that 'bottlenecked' way of sending and receiving emails from 1 account. it is too centralised.

So i've been asked to look into ways so that everyone will send and receive emails from their own accounts, but still be able - at the end of the day - to search through the whole database of emails from all the accounts (will don't have secrets from each other here :P).

With outlook's monolithic approach to storing emails, its impossible to run a search into those files (even if I back them up in the file server).

So i was thinking about a solution of the sort:
have some email client (preferably cross platform since there are both linux and windows machines in the office network), that store emails (in a database or otherwise), which I can save in the file server (perhaps a mysql server) and then run indexed searches on that.

Is that a good and feasible idea? Is there any other idea you might know to share with me?

Thank you in advance for your help!

TB0ne · 12-03-2010, 07:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nass

Hello everyone,
I should warn you in advance that this is not a linux-specific matter. It's a broader IT discussion about email setup possibilities and specific questions about linux clients that offer the ideal functionality (if any exist).

In the office I work in I occasionally do some basic IT stuff. I don't work on IT full time and i'm not an IT professional. So far the way emails have been going in and out of the office has been mainly from 1 account info@myoffice.com. even though everyone has their own accounts too.
Why is that? well so that all emails are in one place when one needs to run a search. (The email applications is MS outlook with its monolithic emails file 'outlook.pst')

The thing is, no one uses that 'bottlenecked' way of sending and receiving emails from 1 account. it is too centralised.

So i've been asked to look into ways so that everyone will send and receive emails from their own accounts, but still be able - at the end of the day - to search through the whole database of emails from all the accounts (will don't have secrets from each other here :P). With outlook's monolithic approach to storing emails, its impossible to run a search into those files (even if I back them up in the file server).

So i was thinking about a solution of the sort:
have some email client (preferably cross platform since there are both linux and windows machines in the office network), that store emails (in a database or otherwise), which I can save in the file server (perhaps a mysql server) and then run indexed searches on that.

Is that a good and feasible idea? Is there any other idea you might know to share with me?
Thank you in advance for your help!

Well, you could do this, but if you've got Outlook as your back-end, you can set up an email 'alias', as read-only, so that all the individual users can access/see the mail for that one account, but will send/receive for theirs as well.

Postfix also gives you this capability on Linux, and you can hook it into MySQL as well. If you've got to do searches, and want long-term archival, that's a better way to go, in my opinion. A simple PHP page could access the database, and give you LOTS of search options. Some links to get you going:
http://linux.die.net/man/5/virtual
http://www.postfix.org/MYSQL_README.html