Searcahble email arcive

You want a solution that would:
   1. Capture every sent and recd mail
   2. Will place them in a searchable database of some sort
   3. Sit outside Domino
   4. Will capture mails regardless of the originator

Hey, this is one thing every organization would like to have. But, you can't get it that easily. I can't tell you who will make it for you, but, i can tell you how one can make such a thing.


This kind of a solution can be implemented in a couple of ways:

1.  A packet capturing software, that detects that a packets is being sent to or being recieved from a particular host on a particular port. Once you have this software, configure it to monitor the communication between your local mail server and your internet mail server. Once captured, have this application store the captured data in some database.

The beauty of such an appliation would be that, it will work transparently. No one would even realize that such a software is at work.

2.  A Tunnel Proxy software that will do all the same things but at a protocol level. Implementing this software would be relatively easier. It can act like a transparent proxy but in addition to passing around the data, it will also capture the relevent data and store them in a database. It will be another software and will probably sit on another system between your local mail server and the Internet mail server.

Such a solution, however, will have many limitations. For example, if it sits on another system it may not be able to capture all the traffic, if users don't use it as a proxy as a rule. Another example, it may not be effective in case of proprietary mail clients (Lotus Notes for example) that use properietary protocols.

3.  Another solution would be to implement a software at the application level as an application extension. Most mail servers come with APIs or allow developing application extensions that can be hooked to the mail server. This will be the most viable option. Not so difficult to imlement and very tightely integrated to the mail system.

Drawback of such a system will be that it will be a mail server specific solution, but advantage would be that it can implement mail serverspecific features which are unique to it.

Apart from your desired attribute of storing outside of Domino, the built-in Journaling function provides exactly what you're looking for.  Every message (or a selected subset) passed through the router can be copied off to an encrypted repository database for later retrieval and review.  Consult the Domino 6 Administrator Help for details.

JEtkins,

ukwebfx wants a 'future proof ' solution, capable of vworking irrespective of the underlying mail server.

Yes, I saw that was he would "be keen" to have it outside of Notes/Domino, hence the caveat in my first sentence.

However, I strongly suspect that it would be simpler to implement Journaling and then build or buy a simple data-migration tool to move the captured mail to a different platform, than it would be to duplicate a function that Lotus has already built in to its product.  Capturing the data is the hard part here; data migration is a relatively simple task.

Ukwebfx even suggests that the need to move to another platform is far from a firm requirement, so it may be that Journaling is a complete solution.  If it was me, I'd use the tool provided, and cross the data-migration bridge if and when I came to it.