1 Topic by Harvey

  • Harvey
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Topic: Spider License Questions

Since there is no free trial version anymore I did some checks with the Licensing as well.

Here are some questions: If I tell spider my EMail domain it seems to count all mail addresses from that domain and based on this information computes the number of mailboxes. From my point of view this seems to be incorrect.

First: mail address != mailbox. Some ISP's have the ability to define more mail addresses than mailboxes. In our case this means that hardware@mydomain.com, bills@mydomain.com, info@mydomain.com, myname@mydomain.com all point to the same mailbox but spider seems to count this as 4 boxes!

Other point: I did import our mail archive currently situated on an IMAP mailbox at our ISP. Every employee that we ever had that used his own mail address seems to be counted as one mailbox. But obviously employees change over the years and this leads to some mail addresses that are no longer valid while others were activated. The number of employees at one time never exceeded let's say 8 people, but in the time of 6 years we had 16 different employees. And although I imported just one mailbox AFAICT spider seems to count this as 16...

Can you elaborate on this topic?

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Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

2 Reply by ZhangHuangbin

  • ZhangHuangbin
  • ZhangHuangbin
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Re: Spider License Questions

Harvey wrote:

First: mail address != mailbox. Some ISP's have the ability to define more mail addresses than mailboxes. In our case this means that hardware@mydomain.com, bills@mydomain.com, info@mydomain.com, myname@mydomain.com all point to the same mailbox but spider seems to count this as 4 boxes!

We're aware of this and mentioned in the MTA setup document[1].

MTA should insert a header named "X-Envelope-To:" with real / final recipient email address, otherwise Spider doesn't know which one is the final recipient and has to count every email address in To:, Cc:, Bcc: as valid recipients. I understand this might be an issue while importing existing emails "X-Envelope-To:" header.

[1] https://spiderd.io/docs/mta-setup-postfix.html

Harvey wrote:

Other point: I did import our mail archive currently situated on an IMAP mailbox at our ISP. Every employee that we ever had that used his own mail address seems to be counted as one mailbox. But obviously employees change over the years and this leads to some mail addresses that are no longer valid while others were activated. The number of employees at one time never exceeded let's say 8 people, but in the time of 6 years we had 16 different employees. And although I imported just one mailbox AFAICT spider seems to count this as 16...

You can import all these emails first, then stop archiving for those invalid email addresses in "Settings -> Email Domains", click the number of mailboxes, then click "Stop Archiving" for those invalid addresses.

And there's no such issues for newly arrived emails on MTA since no invalid address in email header at all.

3 Reply by Harvey

  • Harvey
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Re: Spider License Questions

ZhangHuangbin wrote:

We're aware of this and mentioned in the MTA setup document[1].
MTA should insert a header named "X-Envelope-To:" with real / final recipient email address, otherwise Spider doesn't know which one is the final recipient and has to count every email address in To:, Cc:, Bcc: as valid recipients. I understand this might be an issue while importing existing emails "X-Envelope-To:" header...

[1] https://spiderd.io/docs/mta-setup-postfix.html

Okay, I did only fly through this part of the docu as I don't have an own mail server (yet). Looks like my ISP obviously does not use the X-Envelope-To header. hmm

ZhangHuangbin wrote:

You can import all these emails first, then stop archiving for those invalid email addresses in "Settings -> Email Domains", click the number of mailboxes, then click "Stop Archiving" for those invalid addresses.

And there's no such issues for newly arrived emails on MTA since no invalid address in email header at all.

I see.

My use case is somewhat different from this scenario. I import existing mails that I am not able to convert in any way, because they are already on my IMAP account on my ISP's mail server. They all have been bcc:'ed from different mailboxes on the ISP's mail server to this account and all outgoing mail is bcc:'ed to this mailbox as well using thunderbird's bcc feature. This IMAP account is like a bucket for all my mails.

I plan to keep my spider instance behind my firewall only as an internal archive. It should not be reachable from the Internet (security reasons) and only be available for research in the intranet. All mails should be imported only by using spider-import. This also gives me the ability to filter unwanted spam from the IMAP account before it gets imported (see other thread). Like emptying the bucket at a given time only...

Just a clarification... wink

Greetings
Harvey