With the crazy amount of email people store these days and the even crazier way people use email to transfer files it seems like it's time for Smartermail to have an archive feature for end users.

Basically, the user selects an archive date so SM can archive all mail prior to the selected date. The user then receives an email telling them that their archive is available for download. Much like twitter has done for twitter archives except it should remove the archived email from their folders.

 

It could simply be a zip file with internal folders matching their folder names. Each folder would have the corresponding .eml files.

 

I'm not the brightest bulb so some of you probably have some even better ideas.

 

Keep in mind I'm asking for a feature built-in to Smartermail. Yes, I know email clients can achieve this task but it's not that easy for end users to install a client, set it up to retrieve mail, and not accidentally pop all of their mail. Even if they get it right and use IMAP there is still a learning curve and need for tech support to configure the client's archive settings. It's just no fun walking someone through Thunderbird or Outlook archive settings. Now multiply that times the number of users you have and... well, you get the idea. It's a lot of tech support.

 

Not only that, but if you convinced them to switch to webmail and then you turn around and tell them they still need to use an email client it just turns in to a very long discussion and leaves room for questions about why they migrated to webmail in the first place.

 

Some more ideas to discuss would be how long the archive is available after the initial download. Does it auto-delete or do they have to confirm it was downloaded successfully? How does it affect their disk quotas? Is there a better format than zip that would make it easier to use? Should they be able to easily restore the archive to Smartermail? Should there be an archive option for the domain admin?