Preventing deletion

[Richard]

Although we don't have to comply with SOX and friends, yet, I think this would be a great Zimbra feature. And a potentially selling point to larger corporations. The advantage of doing it from within Zimbra (instead of Postfix) would be that you wouldn't increase the number of messages in the message store. You'd just increase the number of pointers by one. A simple way of implementing this would be to have a second "shadow" account for each "real" account and have the mail delivered to both. If the real account deletes the message, their pointer goes away but the message is still stored for the shadow. Perhaps you'd never have to reclaim space from the message store either. It sounds neat (at least to me).

[KevinH]

Yes, the shadow account approach works today if you setup an always bcc account. We are looking at other ways to make this automatic and easier since native compliance and archiving are important to the Zimbra community.

[fmodola]

Is it possible to implement only one shadow account in which all delete emails are stored with the ID corresponding to the user(s) that deleted it ?

If so, it will avoid to create multiple shadow accounts (what is better for the developers for sure ), which is the best way to simplify the backup/restore process, and it will optimize the searches.

[KevinH]

Is it possible to implement only one shadow account in which all delete emails are stored with the ID corresponding to the user(s) that deleted it ?

If so, it will avoid to create multiple shadow accounts (what is better for the developers for sure ), which is the best way to simplify the backup/restore process, and it will optimize the searches.

Good idea but I think the best way is to have the mail or policy enforced in the *same* mailbox but just hidden from the user. This way it's zero overhead and easy to manage.

[fmodola]

yes, but it increases the disk space usage ... !

[KevinH]

yes, but it increases the disk space usage ... !

No it won't. We only store a single copy of each message per server no matter if it's in the shadow mailbox or the user's mailbox. It's still one copy.