Volume Mounts

Question asked by Rod Strumbel - 5/1/2025 at 7:28 AM

Unanswered

Volume Mounts

Can someone from SmarterMail elaborate on this new feature and it's intended purpose?

We for years have been looking for a way to retain more email archive without keeping it on the live server drives but still having it indexed and accessible. Is that what this is for ?

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Kyle Kerst Replied

5/1/2025 at 7:46 AM

Employee Post

You are correct, any area in SmarterMail that allows for a path designation can have an associated Volume Mount. You can use the Volume Mounts to mount anything you would normally mount in Windows or Linux including shares, new drives/partitions, iSCSI mounts, etc. I recently used this page to load a new iSCSI mount shared from a NAS, create and format a partition on it, and then mount it as pathing for Secondary Storage which we also recently added to domains.

Kyle Kerst Acting IT Manager SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Rod Strumbel Replied

5/1/2025 at 9:29 AM

But wouldn't that put ALL archives on the specified volume?

I was kind of looking at keeping 3 months locally and say 9 months on an external drive.

It's RARE a client needs emails restored from long ago (but it happens), but having to restore info from the most recent few months is commonplace.

Matt Petty Replied

5/1/2025 at 9:35 AM

Employee Post

Thats exactly what the Secondary Storage does :)
It works for Email and File Storage atm, recently accessed mail and files will be moved to "active" (current) storage until they fall behind the specified time, and then will be moved to secondary.

Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Rod Strumbel Replied

5/1/2025 at 10:39 AM

Ok, I'll have to look into all that. The Volume Mounts documentation, is kinda lacking in "application". :)

Derek Curtis Replied

5/1/2025 at 10:47 AM

Employee Post

It's a new feature, and a new way of doing things, so the initial documentation was an explanation of the different settings. Application has been added, it just isn't published yet. In addition, it's difficult to offer a comprehensive list of everything it can be used for. If you've mounted drives, etc. before on a server, then put them into use, this is essentially the same thing, it's just automated through SmarterMail.

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

David Jamell Replied

5/4/2025 at 4:07 AM

What happens if the mounted volume fails? How Fault Tolerant is this feature?

Kyle Kerst Replied

5/5/2025 at 8:00 AM

Employee Post

If a volume mount fails to mount we note it as having failed on the Volume Mounts page. This is the case for newly added and existing mounts. If one of your mounts were to be taken offline later - I expect SmarterMail will react the same way it does if a hard drive goes missing in that domains or other data on those volumes will fail to load and generate errors. This is just hooking into the existing mounting functionality built into your server's operating system, so should behave no differently.

Kyle Kerst Acting IT Manager SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

David Jamell Replied

5/5/2025 at 8:58 AM

So, if a Volume Mount fails and then a day later it is brought back online will the Secondary Storage be brought "up to date" to be in a consistent state?

Andrew Barker Replied

5/5/2025 at 12:36 PM

Employee Post

David,

In that scenario, any domain that uses that mount for secondary storage should be brought back up to date when secondary storage is next processed as part of the nightly tasks.

Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Sérgio Rocha Replied

5/19/2025 at 4:09 AM

Hi,

This is great news, I wanting so long to have Sysadmin new features! really really great.

I will take a look on this. I dont know the detail, but thanks ST to do some sys admin feature.

Regards,

Sérgio Rocha Replied

5/19/2025 at 4:28 AM

Hello again,

This looks like the feature request I made—brilliant! I do have a few questions, though:

Is the email file move handled by ST, or do I need to perform it manually?
Could you consider developing native S3 support, to avoid the need for third-party software?

Thanks again!

Andrew Barker Replied

5/19/2025 at 7:25 AM

Employee Post

Sérgio,

The move will happen automatically. An initial move is processed as soon as secondary storage is configured for the domain, and the domain is checked nightly to see if any more data needs to be moved.

Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Sérgio Rocha Replied

5/21/2025 at 5:02 AM

Thank you very much for listening to the community — I’m very pleased with ST’s work. We still look forward to more features to support system administration, but this functionality is a remarkable step forward.

Tan Replied

5/22/2025 at 6:52 AM

This is really a cool new feature. 👏

Let's said i have a user that has 40GB worth of email and they are using IMAP. If the secondary storage goes offline, will they still be able to use IMAP on the latest email with just the missing "old" email right?

Derek Curtis Replied

5/22/2025 at 9:08 AM

Employee Post

That's correct, Tan. Anything stored on the primary path would still be accessible.

Derek Curtis COO SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Sérgio Rocha Replied

5/24/2025 at 5:18 AM

Hello everyone, I just wanted to stop by to congratulate the developers and SmarterTools — the feature is really well done. I’ve been testing it, and when we disable it, it collects all the data from the secondary storage and even deletes the folder at the end. The attention to the details, very well

Tan Replied

5/24/2025 at 6:13 AM

@Derek Curtis

Question.

1. Can we choose to move secondary storage on a weekly bassis instead of daily because im thinking if secondary storage can be schedule to move on every Saturday, i can schedule for Sunday for backup. This will save tons of resources.

2. If the user copy an old email from inbox (secondly storage), into a new folder. Does it get moved in the secondary storage or it will move into the main storage and restart the age?

Sérgio Rocha Replied

5/25/2025 at 4:17 AM

@tan

1 At the moment you cant choose, but its a very well think, because at the moment there always thinks movyng in, and it should be lees active storage.

2. I dont have sure, but it will stay on 2 storage.

Tan Replied

6/21/2025 at 9:56 PM

Anyone try this feature on production server already? Am thinking which build is stable for me to try this out 😀

Sérgio Rocha Replied

6/23/2025 at 9:06 AM

Yes, I did.

I'm very happy with the features — they will allow us to launch new plans with much more storage.
No complaints at all.

During my testing, I noticed that accessing archived emails via webmail is a bit slow, but as I said, no complaints, you can chose how old the email need to be before archive — there's plenty of new NVMe storage available.

The feature is very well implemented. If you disable the secondary storage, the software automatically reallocates all the space to the main storage.

My only preference that something diferente would be for the archiving process to run at a defined schedule rather than continuously in the background.

As a last note :) my archive for the moment its in a external S3 volume, its the worst case possible. In the future probably I will migrate for a ISCSI volume on a external NAS.

Regards,

Andrew Barker Replied

6/23/2025 at 11:00 AM

Employee Post

Sérgio,

The process for moving data from primary to secondary storage doesn't run continuously, it only runs as part of the nightly tasks. The two exceptions to this are:

When secondary storage is configured for a domain, SmarterMail will immediately start an initial move to secondary storage.
When secondary storage is disabled for a domain, SmarterMail will immediately start moving the data out of secondary storage.

Keep in mind that all of this applies to when the process is started. The duration of the process depends primarily on how much data needs to be moved and how quickly it can be copied from primary storage to secondary storage.

Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Tan Replied

6/26/2025 at 11:28 PM

@Sérgio Rocha

That's cool! that means if the primary storage has not enough storage to move back, the system must block the activity from happen.

@Andrew Barker,

1. If the user copy an old email from inbox (secondly storage), into a new folder. Does it get moved in the secondary storage or it will move into the main storage and restart the age?

2. I am thinking of connecting a few SmarterMail to the same secondary storage (same drive letter + target folder). My idea is that if I need to move Domain A from Server 1 to 2 (both connected to the same NAS path for secondary storage). Do I just unmount , move the entire domain folder to server 2 and mount it back? Then no action required for secondary storage. Does this works?

Andrew Barker Replied

6/30/2025 at 7:02 AM

Employee Post

Tan,

1. Currently, the message would be moved into main storage and restart the age. We have revisited this in discussion a couple times, and it may change in the future, but for now we wanted to get the base behavior as solid as possible before we address scenarios like this.

2. Based on your description, I believe that will work.

Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Tan Replied

7/1/2025 at 6:46 AM

Hi Andrew Barker
Sorry for so many questions but i really want to fully understand how it really works.

1. I know that smartermail write email to disk based on YYYY_MM_DD.grp, when you mention age, do you mean the email received timestamp (example: 01 Jan 2025) that determine the age of the email? so if I move from Inbox root folder to sub-folder (example: Vendor), it will move tonight because I have set 90 days for the secondary storage as the email age is based on received timestamp. Is this how it works?

2. Nice, got it.

Andrew Barker Replied

7/1/2025 at 7:36 AM

Employee Post

Tan,

Because of the available options for Folder Auto-Clean, SmarterMail keeps track of when each folder was added to the folder it is currently in. The secondary storage logic uses that date, which might not correspond to the date of the GRP the message is stored in. Under this behavior, if you move a message from the Inbox to another folder, that effectively resets the 90 days for that message.

Andrew Barker Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

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