UNIX/Linux e-mail consolidation tips

Server Tips by Donald BurlesonFebruary 4, 2015

Common Question: I want to consolidate and archive my company e-mails. My employees waste too much time reading messages that they are "copied" on, and I want software to file all e-mails, such that my employees can quickly get up-to-speed by opening a single e-mail archive for each client.

Answer: There are many tools and products for e-mail consolidation, and within Oracle we have the 11g Collaboration Suite for e-mail filing. However, you can easily write your own jobs to parse and file both incoming and outgoing e-mails.

However, some standards are required to make this work:

For employee outgoing e-mails, all employees will copy an a-mail ID which will be specified for each client.
All employees must use a company e-mail account

My vision is to parse and file all company e-mails by client name. Using this single archive, we have a complete record of all incoming and outgoing communications. In a nutshell, this software simply "copies" e-mail files from the employee directories to the client e-mail directories:

Each client has a separate e-mail log directory on the UNIX/Linux server. This might be a directory with individual e-mails as subdirectories.
The filed e-mail will preserve all embedded attachments and images.
The client-organized e-mail log file will have 100% security, and be impenetrable by even the most sophisticated hackers.
The e-mail log will be easily accessible (via the web), anytime it is needed, and it will function like any other e-mail browser, preserving all attachments and images.

Approaches to automated e-mail consolidation:

There are many ways to solve this problem, and questions to be addressed:

Should the client have an e-mail account, so that the employee can simply download the e-mail consolidation for each client, when they need to see them?
Do we intercept e-mails at arrival time vs. cron to file them hourly?
How to conduct setup and testing of ssh and/or SecureCRT?
Alerts and password disable with hack attempts

This is psuedocode shell script can be used to find new e-mail files in the last day:

for myuser in `etc/passwd'
do
find /home/don/mail/inbox/*.trc -mtime +1
done

��