[BUGS] Request for comment on email sorting

[Jerahmy Pocott]

Hello everyone,

I'm just looking for some comments/ideas on how you would go about  
providing an elegant (or even messy by working) solution for this  
situation.. I have a few ideas but would love to get some different  
opinions!

The set up is as follows: Users all get their mail from where ever via  
their own means using some mail client (outlook pretty much 100% of  
the time). I.E. It's out side my scope.

What I want to achieve is the following:

1) Keep a copy of ALL mail sent and received for backup purposes,  
these mail stores should only be viewable by the user whos mail it has  
for privacy reasons.

My thoughts are to create either a single imap/mail box or one for  
each user and putting a single rule in their mail clients to put a  
copy of everything in that box. I thought imap might be good because  
they can easily browse the backup mail store and possibly delete  
things they don't want in it any more. Obviously multiple boxs would  
be easier for security, but point two is actually more important than  
point 1, and multiple accounts may cause difficulties with that.

2) Filter all new mail that is stored with a set of rules that either  
forwards or copies matching mail to another account. For example all  
mail that contains say the key word "project xyz" should end up in a  
common place regardless of who received/sent it.

This could be achieved with multiple rules in everyones client, but  
that would be very messy and difficult to administer.. And it can't  
really all be sent to a mail client for filtering due to privacy. So  
the filtering needs to happen prior to anyone being able to see the  
mail.

I like the idea of a single imap store that is accessed by different  
users and assigned what they can read/write based on user.. But that  
may not really be feasible, there is also the fact that outlook  
doesn't seem to play all that nicely with imap.

Obviously the server is running FreeBSD =P

Thanks for any ideas!

Cheers,
Jerahmy.