citadel/docs/journaling.html

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  10 <h1>Message Journaling with the Citadel System</h1>
  11 <h2>A technical guide</h2>
  12 Copyright &copy;2006 by the Citadel development team.<br>
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  17 <hr>
  18
  19 <h3><a name="toc">Table of Contents</a></h3>
  20
  21 <a href="#introduction">Introduction</a><br>
  22 <a href="#overview">Technical overview of Citadel journaling</a><br>
  23 <a href="#resource">Additional resource utilization</a><br>
  24 <a href="#where">Where should I send the journalized messages?</a><br>
  25 <a href="#configuration">How to configure journaling</a><br>
  26 <a href="#disclaimer">Disclaimer</a><br>
  27
  28 <hr>
  29
  30 <h3><a name="introduction">Introduction</a></h3>
  31
  32 <p>There are many different environments in which the Citadel system is
  33 useful for messaging and collaboration tasks.  Naturally, many sites use
  34 Citadel as their organization's primary email server.  Some of these
  35 organizations are corporations which operate in industries that are subject
  36 to regulations which dictate that all electronic messages must be archived
  37 for some period of time.</p>
  38
  39 <p>Message journaling is a function of the Citadel system which provides the
  40 ability to record all messages which are processed by the server.  Journaling,
  41 by itself, is <i>not</i> a message archival service, nor should one attempt to
  42 treat it as one.  We recommend that you combine Citadel journaling with a
  43 third-party archival product or service, in order to assemble a data retention
  44 solution that will meet the requirements of your organization.</p>
  45
  46 <h3><a name="overview">Technical overview of Citadel journaling</a></h3>
  47
  48 <p>In order to keep the configuration options simple and straightforward,
  49 Citadel implements only one variety of journaling.  It is generally known
  50 in the messaging universe as &quot;envelope journaling.&quot;  As you are
  51 probably already aware, one cannot trust the headers of any particular
  52 message to be a reliable indication of which users have read it.  In addition
  53 to the declared sender and recipients, there may also be blind carbon copy
  54 (BCC) recipients, recipients on one or more mailing lists, and even recipients
  55 who are not listed due to forged or badly formed headers.</p>
  56
  57 <p>The format of a journalized message, therefore, contains extra information
  58 about who <i>actually</i> sent and/or received the original message.  The very
  59 first portion of the journalized message lists the sender, message ID, and
  60 recipients.  It should be noted that the listed Sender and Recipients are
  61 those which were relevant to delivery <i>on the Citadel server performing the
  62 journaling of the message.</i>  If the message arrived via SMTP from the
  63 outside world, any recipients not on the local Citadel server would not be
  64 listed, because they were not involved in the transaction which delivered the
  65 message to the server.</p>
  66
  67 <p>The original message is then included, as an attachment of type
  68 <tt>message/rfc822</tt>, to the journal message.</p>
  69
  70 <p>This logic provides the ability to answer these questions:
  71 <ul>
  72 <li>If a message was sent <i>from</i> someone on this server, who received it?
  73 <li>If a message was sent <i>to</i> someone on this server, who <i>else</i>
  74 received it?
  75 </ul>
  76 Either question can be answered by searching your archive for the message in
  77 question and reviewing the names and addresses listed in the journalized
  78 messages.</p>
  79
  80
  81 <h3><a name="resource">Additional resource utilization</a></h3>
  82
  83 <p>On a server with message journaling enabled, each message must pass through
  84 the submit chain twice: once for the delivery of the original message, and once
  85 for the delivery of the journalized message.  You must plan accordingly for the
  86 additional overhead which will be incurred.  Nearly twice as much CPU, memory,
  87 and disk space will be consumed by journaling.</p>
  88
  89 <p>Despite the extra processing, however, it should be noted that the Citadel
  90 server performs journaling as a deferred background operation.  This allows
  91 interactive users to continue along instead of waiting for the server to
  92 synchronously journal each message that is submitted.</p>
  93
  94
  95 <h3><a name="where">Where should I send the journalized messages?</a></h3>
  96
  97 <p>As previously noted, any valid email address may be used as the destination
  98 for journalized messages.  Where you send your journalized messages will
  99 likely depend upon how you are going to archive them.</p>
 100
 101 <p>Some archival systems contain their own email addresses.  With these
 102 products and services, you are expected to email your journalized messages
 103 directly to a specific address.  This is typically referred to as "push"
 104 journaling because the transfer is initiated by your server.  If you intend
 105 to use this type of system, the required configuration is obvious: the
 106 journal destination is the email address of your archival system.</p>
 107
 108 <p>Other archival systems are built around the idea that you should provide
 109 a dedicated email address on <i>your</i> server, and the archival system
 110 periodically uses POP3 (or POP3S, the SSL-encrypted version of POP3) to poll
 111 the mailbox for new journalized messages.  Upon successful retrieval of new
 112 messages, the archival system deletes the journalized messages from your
 113 server.  This is typically referred to as "pull" journaling because the
 114 transfer is initiated externally.  If you intend to use this type of system,
 115 you should create a dedicated account on your Citadel server for this purpose,
 116 and then configure that account as the journal destination.  No real users
 117 should ever log in to this account.  It exists solely as a drop box for
 118 journalized messages.</p>
 119
 120 <p>In rare instances, you may wish to send the journalized messages to an
 121 address on some other node on a private Citadel network.  This could be useful
 122 if, for example, one server is used to aggregate messages journalized from
 123 several other servers.  It might also be useful if, for some reason, you
 124 require a dedicated server for journaling.</p>
 125
 126 <p>It should also be noted that the message data format contains a field which
 127 declares that a message is actually a journalized copy of some other message.
 128 The Citadel system will not journalize any message which carries this flag.
 129 This prevents messages from being double journalized (or worse, caught in an
 130 infinite loop of journaling).</p>
 131
 132
 133 <h3><a name="configuration">How to configure journaling</a></h3>
 134
 135 <p>After you have formulated a strategy for combining journaling with some
 136 third-party archival product or service as part of a compliance solution, the
 137 actual configuration is very easy.  You only need to set the following three
 138 configuration items in Citadel:
 139 <ul>
 140 <li>Perform journaling of email messages?  (Yes or No)
 141 <li>Perform journaling of non-email messages?  (Yes or No)
 142 <li>Address to which journalized messages are to be sent?  (Specify any email address)
 143 </ul>
 144 </p>
 145
 146 <p>From the text-based Citadel client, these options may be found in the
 147 <tt><b>.A</b>ide <b>S</b>ystem-configuration <b>G</b>eneral</tt> command.  You
 148 will see the following options among the many other options in this dialog:
 149 <pre>
 150 Perform journaling of email messages [Yes]:
 151 Perform journaling of non-email messages [Yes]:
 152 Email destination of journalized messages [example@example.com]:
 153 </pre>
 154 &quot;Non-email messages&quot; refers to any message which has no recipients.
 155 This includes posts to public and private rooms, calendar items, address book
 156 entries, notes, tasks, instant messages, and any other data types which may
 157 be introduced in the future.
 158 </p>
 159
 160 <p>Naive administrators may find the categorization of instant messages in the
 161 latter category to be somewhat confusing.  After all, instant messages do have
 162 both a sender and a recipient.  However, they were never passed through the
 163 email submission and delivery chain, therefore they are not categorized as
 164 email.  As you already know, all instant messages are saved as posts to the
 165 <tt>Sent/Received Pages</tt> rooms of both the sender and recipient.  These
 166 posts are actually what is being journaled.</p>
 167
 168 <p>Configuration of journaling using WebCit is even easier.  Log in with your
 169 web browser and then select Administration --&gt; Edit site-wide
 170 configuration --&gt; Indexing/Journaling, and you will find the same three
 171 options.</p>
 172
 173 <p>It is not necessary to restart the Citadel server when you change your
 174 journaling options.  Changes will take effect immediately.</p>
 175
 176
 177 <h3><a name="disclaimer">Disclaimer</a></h3>
 178
 179 <p>The message journaling feature of Citadel is only one component which may
 180 be utilized as part of a larger solution for regulatory compliance.  The
 181 Citadel developers do not make any guarantee, expressed or implied, that this
 182 functionality by itself will cause your organization's email services to
 183 be sufficiently archived.  It is up to you to design your complete archival
 184 solution, to test it, and to evaluate its ability to comply with whatever
 185 regulations are relevant to your organization.</p>
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