Sever setup and email archival

This folder contains the necessary steps and files to set up a server and archive emails. The following instructions below have been tested on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS.

Postfix setup

The server uses a Postfix mail agent to receive emails. Once you've purchased your domain name, first point its mail exchanger record (MX record) to this server's IP address.

Then, follow these steps to install Postfix on your server.

Postfix hook

Once the Postfix server is installed, add a hook in Postfix's master.cf configuration file to execute the script.sh shell script.

myhook unix - n n - - pipe
flags=F user=amathur argv=/mnt/volume_nyc3_01/script.sh ${sender} ${size} ${recipient}

Replace user=amathur with the name of your user. The master.cf file available in this repository describes how to incorporate the hook in the Postfix configuration file.

Python setup

Create a virtual environment with the packages listed in the requirements.txt file.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Edit the script.sh script to invoke the virtual environment.

Archiving emails

The script.py is responsible for archiving emails. The file runs through the script.sh script when the Postfix hook is activated on an incoming email.

The script.py file contains further documentation on the various folder structure that result from the archival of a single email. Replace the BASE_DIR variable in the script.py file with the destination directory where you would like to archive the emails. Also replace the EMAIL_DOMAIN variable in the utils.py file with the domain name of your server.

Note that the file also expects HTTrack and Google Chrome to be installed on the server.

We used HTTrack v3.49-2 and Google Chrome v78.0.3904.97 for our project.