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I'm looking for an open source application that will archive my email. It might do this by logging in to my POP3 account on a regular basis and copying the emails across, or it might just read my Unix mbox/maildir file/directory directly on the mail server.

It must be open and it must run on Linux (or any open OS actually). Ideally, it would have a web interface, but this is not a major requirement.

MXsense (http://www.mxsense.com/mxsense.html) seems to be pretty-much what I want, except it's not open.

I have no requirement for MS Exchange support.

Any suggestions?

The rationale (maybe a bit silly) is that I run Linux exclusively and it's still doesn't have an email client that is anywhere close to MS Outlook in terms of awesomeness, so I find myself switching between mail clients often. I would feel better about this if I had an archive of my emails, so it wouldn't matter which mail client I was using this month.

Joel
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9 Answers9

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There's an open source product to do what you're looking for, though it may be a bit heavy-weight for a single mailbox. It's got a normalized relational database schema and uses Postgres on the back-end for data storage (such that you can "connect" to the mail store with ODBC drivers, etc). Have a look: http://www.archiveopteryx.org/

Evan Anderson
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It sound like you may be over-thinking this a bit. Why not just write a script that archives (think tar) the mailbox on the server with the date/time as part of the filename and store that somewhere? Run it as often as you like via cron.

As for the client, Evolution is the only thing I've found that's anywhere near an Outlook replacement. I haven't used it for a couple of years but when I did I was very pleased and impressed.

John Gardeniers
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If you have access to your .forward file or you have access to the box, you can pipe mail to the file every time you receive it.

Even without direct server access you could use fetchmail to pick up your mail and store it. This post is interesting - http://lifehacker.com/software/gmail/geek-to-live--back-up-gmail-with-fetchmail-235207.php

For web interface you could use http://www.mhonarc.org/ to create html archive.

Skyhawk
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Martynas Saint
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Following up on Martynas' response, you could also set a forward to copy a gmail (or similar) account, and you can probably set your mail client to bcc that same gmail account for every message you compose/send. Then you can just log in to gmail to go through (or better yet, search) your archive.

This is more of a single-user based approach. I use IMAP instead of POP, so it doesn't matter which mail client I am using (or on which computer), as all mail is stored and organized on the server.

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Try Mailarchiva, it is a good mail archival system with search options.

avi

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Enkive is an open source email archive and recovery tool, which has a number of great features like full-text search, search result exports, and deduplication.

mgorven
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Anonymous
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There is a command line program, archivemail, which does what you want.

http://archivemail.sourceforge.net/

user68860
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if you are still searching for an open source email archiving solution, then try piler (http://www.mailpiler.org/). It offers lot more than the mailarchiva open source edition.

Janos
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  • Welcome to ServerFault! Please read the [faq] (you'll even earn a [badge](http://serverfault.com/badges) if you complete it) before posting. Although open source is wonderful, I hope you're here to offer more than links to your project on three-year-old questions. – jscott May 01 '12 at 00:11
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Try evolution. It is as good as MS OUtlook. May be you wont look for archiving then. Or thunderbird which works on both Windows and Linux.

Saurabh Barjatiya
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  • Why not? But it is not the question he asked. – bortzmeyer Jul 21 '09 at 14:22
  • Both evolution and thunderbird support POP3 protocol. So they can be used to download pop3 emails from servers for archiving and storing locally. Also they can be configured to remove the copy of email from server if necessary. I guess that makes my answer relevant to question. Also the question mentioned he feels there is no client as good as MS Outlook. So it was important to mention clients like evolution / thunderbird are as good as MS Outlook. – Saurabh Barjatiya Jul 21 '09 at 16:36