Hello,
Actually one of the "issue" we have a service provider using SmarterMail is that we can't dedicate a storage for storing mail attachments.
On other mail solutions we use, for example one based on the opensource dovecot project, we can set a separate storage for attachments.
This has many advantages:
- We can use a different backup strategy for the attachement dedicated folder
- The attachments are saved decoded instead of mime encoded, therfore it takes less space.
- It has options for deduplication (a redudent attachment with same checksum, is only stored once and can be referenced to multiple mail objects)
- We can decide to remove attachments from mails after a chosen period of time
This significally decrease the users mailboxes size. For example an attached 10MB document sent to 20 users of a domain will take only 10MB of space instead of (20 x 10 x mime encoding size increase ratio) ~300MB.
For a server with lot of users this can really make a huge difference.
On dovecot this exists since 2010 is easily configurable for example like this:
mail_home = /mailstore/local/%d/%n
mail_location = mdbox:/mailstore/local/%d/%n:ALT=/mailstore/remote/%d/%n
mail_attachment_fs = sis posix
mail_attachment_dir = /mailstore/attachments
mail_attachment_min_size = 128k
We would really love to see such an option in SmarterMail and think it would really add a plus to it.
Kind regards