Hi,

At work, it has recently been decided to introduce some quite draconian e-mail retention policies. Sadly I have used my work e-mail address for everything for a number of years now and don't want to have to manually archive / print / move everything.

What I'd like to do is to set up forwarding from my work e-mail to a private e-mail server at home. Work is exchange / Outlook and when the mail arrives it will all appear to come "from" me.

What I need help with is stripping off the first mail header prior to mailbox delivery. That way, if a colleague sends me an e-mail and a rule forwards it to me at home, it will show up as coming from them.

I would also, if possible, like to achieve the following:

If I send an e-mail using my work account, have a rule to send a copy to my home system and have the come system put the mail in my sent items mailbox.

If I forward a whole load of mails (this is really dealing with my archive) they will be sent as a multiple attachments to a single e-mail. I'd like to unpack them into the individual mails when they arrive.

Can anyone offer any advice?

Thanks :-)

First, let me welcome you to LQ.

Unfortunately, my feeling is that your question is, in principle, a violation of the LQ rule against "fraud or any topic that could be damaging to either LinuxQuestions.org or any third party". A link to the rules may be found here.

While I certainly do sympathize with your position and have been in similar ones myself, your company has put these rules in place for a reason and to help you to get around these rules could be harmful to LQ. The problem with email is a legal one and it pertains to the process of discovery and records retention. By having a records retention policy that clearly states the time frame after which (email) records will be destroyed it limits the scope of discovery. By violating these kinds of directives, you could cause a lot of trouble both for yourself and your employer.

@all, I have flagged this post for moderator review. Until they have had a chance to weigh in on this subject matter, it would best to leave this thread alone.

Thank you for you full and frank response.

Perhaps I wasn't clear.

My problem is that I have, for some time, used my work e-mail account as my only e-mail account. I therefore have a large number of e-mails in my system which are not work-related, but that I want to keep. I also receive a large number of e-mails at my work account which are personal.

Currently, I have rules set up which divert these e-mails to folders in Exchange.

What I want to achieve is a painless move of these e-mails to a private e-mail system. This is NOT an attempt to work around company policies for business-related mails.

The company's (quite reasonable) view is that any e-mails I want to keep need to be moved from the system. To do this will require forwarding them one by one or having them all forwarded as attachments to a single e-mail, neither of which fill me with joy. Hence my desire to "unpack" attached e-mail messages. We're talking several hundred mails here!!

Similarly, I can alter my existing rules to divert personal e-mails to my home account rather than a folder on the work server. Again, however, I would lose something by doing this, namely the ability to know from the mail header who the mail cam from, since all mails would come from me.

Finally, if I reply to a personal e-mail form work, I would cause the mail to be copied to my home "sent items" folder. I could possibly achieve this by having a second "target" address, but want it to be as simple as possible.

I hope this explains my requirements more fully and clarifies that this isn't about subverting business processes or procedures.

Your explanation makes things quite a bit more clear, thank you.

What email client(s) are you using? Perhaps you could archive to disk the messages that you want to keep and then import the archive into a folder at home? For example, Evolution will import from a lot of different applications including Outlook. This would preserve the original email headers, avoid having to transmit each message as a forward, and work for both sent and received items.

Email is largely plain text, even though it sometimes seems to be funky binary formats. This means that if all else fails you should be able to resort to your original plan and extract the emails and remove unwanted headers based upon regex rules. A perl script could be used to loop through the entire set and extract the messages to files.

Thanks again for your response.

I'm using Outlook 2007 at work, connected to Exchange. My primary means of access to my home e-mail will be from my Android-based phone and my iPod.

I appreciate that e-mail is largely text, what I'm looking for is some assistance with command-line tools to let me write a scrip that Postfix will call as mail arrives to strip the first header off. I'm not familiar enough with sed and regex to do it myself!

An interesting thought concerning moving - I may try setting up a second account in Outlook and see if I can just move the messages directly. It would certainly solve the whole "unpacking mail attachments" issue. Assuming hat is a not-flyer, can anyone help me do this?

For my ongoing needs, however, I can't really see a way around the forwarding method - I want it to be as automatic and transparent as possible