OpenLSM : Email Archiving : Open Legacy Storage Mail

 

This software is done and ready to be used.

 

Its principle consists to take its fundation on OpenLSD and to make an appropriate version (as any OpenLSD project for specific business needs) to handle the email archiving.

 

This version takes as basis a free email client (such as ThunderBird) and will allow the user to transfer the emails he found useful to archive. Nevertheless, it should be easy to quickly bring this solution to other email clients, whatever the POP or IMAP protocol.

 

This method is the opposite of most of the email archiving software since the archival process is based on the decision from the user and not from an automatic process from the email servers.

 

The main reason of this method is that more than 90% of emails come from SPAM and it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish a SPAM and a regular email. So, even with an hypothetic excellent anti-spam software, in automatic mode, some spam could be integrated in the archival process. Moreover, an anti-spam software can have side effects such as making invalid a regular mail so excluding some regular emails from archival process. 

 

My method is to give the user the responsability to archive or not an email. Therefore, the user should not archive SPAM and would not archive unusefull emails. The making of this solution keeps the problem simple, with standard indexation technics of emails.

 

One web application (J2EE) could be made, based on LDAP directory (other methods could be implemented), in order to allow the user to access later on the archived emails. However the application that is done in the current implementation do not used any authentification step since it is out of the scope and should be done accordingly to the internal process of your organization. It is a model on how to access to OpenLSM functions.

 

All of this project is as the others in full Java.

 

More detailed information can be found here (Concept, Howto, API, download).