Archive Old Mailboxes

[stl]

Recently we've had an employee leave permanently in an unexpected way. They had been with us for almost a decade so that box has gigs of old but still possibly relevant mail. This has exposed to me what seems like an odd way of handling mailboxes in terms of accessing them and how they are counted against the license. For the record we're running the top end Network Edition.

Currently we're right at our user license cap, with a new employee on the way. I had figured that by closing the account of this past employee that it would reduce the license usage, prevent future inbound mail, but still allow a logged in administrator to view old messages. Basically archive the account. However the behavior I see and read in the documentation shows me that's not the case at all.

With the account closed, no inbound mail for it is accepted, which is good. However even an administrator logged in via the web admin console can't view a closed account, it tosses back a 'session ended' error. So.. that sucks. The final problem is that it doesn't reduce the number of used accounts.

To me it would seem that when an account is changed to a closed state it can't be utilized by an end user, so why should it count against the license cap as if it were active? It's left me in the weird position of having to set up a completely standalone mail server and migrate gigs of mail onto that. It seems like a less than enterprise solution.

[gnyce]

I'd be interested in what other people say on this, as I have thought a (very) little about this as well. Some of my ideas...
- bring down the mailbox via POP or IMAP (grabbing the whole thing), thus having a "snapshot" of all that mail, then delete live one
- using the REST, bring down the mailbox (say, in zips, but if there are gigs... how workable is this? Esp. if there are folders. Note - can you do a search folder and use a REST URL to download a zip of the contents of that? If you, you could have a search folder for every year, or something like that
- some sort of neutral/open format archiving tool, again using POP or IMAP

Post back what you find out or end up doing

[stl]

My solution was to set up Dovecot on the server running on a different port and to use imapsync to move the mail, then delete the account out of Zimbra. Totally lame but basically my only valid option.

I'd be interested in what other people say on this, as I have thought a (very) little about this as well. Some of my ideas...
- bring down the mailbox via POP or IMAP (grabbing the whole thing), thus having a "snapshot" of all that mail, then delete live one
- using the REST, bring down the mailbox (say, in zips, but if there are gigs... how workable is this? Esp. if there are folders. Note - can you do a search folder and use a REST URL to download a zip of the contents of that? If you, you could have a search folder for every year, or something like that
- some sort of neutral/open format archiving tool, again using POP or IMAP

Post back what you find out or end up doing