From:	CSBVAX::CSBVAX::MRGATE::"SMTP::CRVAX.SRI.COM::RELAY-INFO-VAX" 24-JAN-1989 11:53
To:	MRGATE::"ARISIA::EVERHART"
Subj:	re: archiving VMS mail


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Date: Tue, 24 Jan 89 10:46 EST
From: "Jerry Leichter (LEICHTER-JERRY@CS.YALE.EDU)"
 <LEICHTER@Venus.YCC.Yale.Edu>
Subject: re: archiving VMS mail
To: SCHAEFFER@amstel.llnl.GOV, INFO-VAX@KL.SRI.COM
X-VMS-To: IN%"SCHAEFFER@amstel.llnl.GOV",INFOVAX

	I am in need of a mechanism for archiving VMS mail for 5-year legal
	records. We have a particular account that is the recipient for such
	mail and after it has been read we must archive it at an interval that
	is convenient to us, probably weekly or monthly. The volume of mail
	messages will likely reach the 100s/day in the near future so it is
	obvious that we do not want to do this manually!

	I could write a DCL procedure to extract each message to a text file
	and then delete it from mail. The text files need to have something
	that indicates the time the mail was received in the file name. We
	can't go to VMS version 5 because of some 3rd party software that
	doesn't work with V5 so callable mail is not an option just yet. Once
	the mail is in text files a simple backup will take care of the
	archiving.

Two independent ideas:

1.  Take a look at DELIVER, a program that comes with the PMDF mail package.
It allows you (among other things) to set up a batch job which will be
triggered by the arrival of any mail for an account.  The job can do whatever
it wants with the mail.

This is a nice general scheme, but I suspect it would require a large, com-
pletely dedicated system to deal with hundreds of messages a day!

2.  You can do surprising things with MAIL as it stands.  First of all, any
mail whose text is more than about 512 bytes long (I forget the exact number)
is stored in one of those MAIL$<big-hex-number> files you see in your mail
subdirectory.  The <big-hex-number> is simply the hex representation of the
VMS standard date-time string that the mail was received.  So in a way you
already have what you are looking for.

Second, even in V4, SELECT and MOVE are more powerful than people usually
realize.  For example,

	SELECT MAIL/BEFORE:today-31-

selects all mail more than 31 days old.  Once the selection is made, you can
do:

	MOVE/ALL MAIL ARCHIVE

moves all the selected mail to folder MAIL in file ARCHIVE.  This allows you
to create "time slices" out of your mail, which you can then save with BACKUP
and delete.  (If your slices always are for all messages in some interval, and
you don't do anything bizarre with your mail files, using the dates of crea-
tion of the MAIL$xxx.MAI files for selection in BACKUP will let you pick out
the files that really belong to the time slice.)

BTW, this touches on an issue recently discussed here:  If you are really
receiving hundreds of messages a day, and deleting (archiving) the old ones
on a regular basis, your the directory file for your mail subdirectory will
soon become huge and badly organized.  Access will be very slow.  The way to
fix this is to create a temporary directory, rename all the files in your
mail subdirectory into the new one, delete the mail subdirectory, and rename
the temporary directory to the name of the old mail directory.  This is best
done at a time when you are certain no new mail will arrive, since there is
a short period during which your mail directory isn't set up right.  I've
attached an extract from a command file I run every week.

							-- Jerry

$!
$! Re-create the mail subdirectory ([.MAIL]).  This is done in an order
$! which minimizes the time in which an invalid mail configuration exists.
$! Nevertheless, things CAN go wrong (if the system crashes at just the wrong
$! time, for example).
$!
$! This code will not work as written on VMS V5 - it would need to set the
$! files in [.MAIL] to have O:REWD or VMS V5 won't allow it to rename them.
$! At the end, it should probably change the protections back.
$!
$ create/dir/prot=(S:RWE,O:RWE,G,W)		[.WEEKLY_TEMP]
$ rename/nolog [.MAIL]*.*;*/exclude=mail.mai;*	[.WEEKLY_TEMP]
$ rename MAIL.dir		WEEKLY_TEMP1.dir
$ rename WEEKLY_TEMP.dir	MAIL.dir
$ rename [.WEEKLY_TEMP1]*.*;*	[.MAIL]		! Move the MAIL.MAIL file
$ set file/prot=O:REWD WEEKLY_TEMP1.dir
$ delete WEEKLY_TEMP1.dir;