Email Retention Policy

[ehavemann]

Our company has a newfound interest in setting up a formal Email Retention policy, the specifics of which are yet to be worked out. I understand I can probably fox AMS into some degree of compliance by way of content filtering and setting "Delete By" rules. But these apply only to inbound emails. But (a) is there any way to capture archive and log outbound mails, and (b) are are there any plans underway to make email retention policy more explicitly "built in" to AMS?

[Code Crafters]

Content filtering is for incoming and outgoing mail. All mail comes in through SMTP, delivered locally and if there are any external addresses sent out via Outgoing Mails as well. You can use the preset content filter rules "Send Copy of All/Incoming/Outgoing Mail To" to make a copy of all/incoming/outgoing mail to another email account as appropriate. You can also use the conditions of these as a template in conjunction with different conditions and actions to make your own rules. You can make custom logs via content filtering and there are also smtp and outmail logs stored automatically. See the Logging settings to enable and disable these. Please let me know if this doesn't cover the email retention that you need sufficiently.

[ehavemann]

(1) I will probably need to preserve an archival "Inbox" and a "Sent Mail" folder for each user, regardless of the user's email client (Outlook vs AMS Webmail, for example). I can do this either by creating a "dummy" domain "archive_company.com" and replicating each username in the dummy domain, or creating a parallel set of mailboxes in the same domain like "archive_username@company.com".

(2) Would a "Send Copy of All Outgoing Mail To" content filter rule capture emails sent out from, say, a Microsoft Outlook client whose outbound SMTP server is directed to my Ability server?

(3) One of the content filtering actions is "Execute Application" which accepts parameters. Can field tags be in those parameters? Any other parameters available? (specifically the path\name of the config\"domain"\"useraccount"\inbox\"randomtextname".txt file containing the email).

(4) Can I create custom header fields (like "ARCHIVE_FROM:") and replace it with regular text concatenated with a field tag ('like 'ARCHIVE_####FROMADDRESS####')? And then that custom header is injected into the raw *.txt file containing the email?

(5) I can probably write a script that parses out emails saved in any arbitrary folder (like copies of all outbound emails sent to an account) and programmatically move them into different folders based on info (such as custom headers and field tags) contained in the .txt file. I don't think I can do this strictly with AMS rules, unless I define a rule for each user, because I can't construct a "wildcard" alternate email address (eg, *@archive_company.com) based on the original address (eg, *@company.com).

[Code Crafters]

1) You can simply set up each account to save sent mails to Sent Items folder via the user's Account options editable via WebMail or the admin interface. You can use the group settings to force these folders to exist on creation and permanently.

2) Yes, as long as you put your Ability Mail Server as the incoming and outgoing mail server for outlook all outgoing mail will be saved in the Sent Items folder as specified above in (1).

3) Yes, field tags can be used in the execute application. "%s" is the tag for the mail text file for the mail while being processed by content filtering.

4) Yes, using the "Add/Edit Header Line" content filter action you can add extra header lines to the email but you should use a "X_" prefix for custom header fields that aren't part of the SMTP standard.

5) Content filtering is very versatile and can be used to move mail to another folder within whatever account directory the mail is destined for within local accounts based on a large variety of conditions. Please provide more information on any content filtering you want to achieve and I'll let you know the conditions and actions to use for this.