Barrendero

NEWS

08-June-2001: Please tell me if you want more development on barrendero here
28-May-2000: Version 1.1pre1 is under test. It will be here soon
17-Aug-1999: Version 1.0 is out! Program mostly rewritten. See changelog for details.

Brief description

Barrendero is a program designed to free up disk space in the mail spool directory. It acomplishes this by deleting messages older than a certain age. Users get warned about messages soon to be deleted and gets a report of the erased mails.

The problem

At large sites (universities, isps, etc) there are lots of mail accounts that are rarely checked by their users. Those accounts grow without control, and the quota method is not (in my opinion) adequated. Using quota means that NEW messages get lost if the limit is reached. With barrendero, OLD messages get deleted, and the new ones (hopefully) will find space to get stored.

How Barrendero works

Barrendero will scan the mail folders in the spool directory and will generate a report of messages older than a certain amount of days. Messages older than the specified delete age are deleted and also included in the report. This report gets mailed to the user, in order to inform about the mails lost and those soon to be lost.
The administrator gets informed about those users that have old messages in their mail folder.

Download

Lastest version is 1.0. It can be downloaded here: barrendero.tar.gz
There is a DEBIAN package that will make into woody. you can grab if from any debian mirror (i.e: ftp://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/binary-all/mail/barrendero_1.0-1.deb)

TO-DO

Some people have suggested ideas to improve barrendero. Some of them are listed here:

Set up a mailing list to notify modifications
Enable other ways to specify exceptions (groups, netgroups, regexps)
Let users choose the preferred languaje
Better date parsing

Changelog

v1.1pre1: (May 30th 2000)
* Barrendero uses the "Received-Date" field if it exists
* New way to specify te mail folders, now ~/.mail folders are supported

v1.0: (Aug 17th 1999)
* Rewritten most of the program. Much enhancements!!
* Using now two "third party" modules for parsing dates. Much 
  better and accurate than the old method
* Support for selecting the languaje in which the reports are to
  be sent. Even per-user selection! 
* Stablished a trigger size, which can be tuned per user. If the mail
  folder is smaller than this, no processing is done.
* Locks are made with semaphores (procmail style) and flock over the mail
  folder. This should help to make the program safer.
* Separated files for the report messages. Full customization posible. :-)
* New config file format. A bit cleaner in my opinion.
* New behaviour over mailfolders. A first check is made to see if a folder
  belongs to a user. If it doesn't, that folder is skiped. THE ROOT FOLDER
  IS NOW IGNORED!! Mail me if you think that it shouldn't be this way.
* Comments and source code is now in English, to make it easy to contribute.
  -- There is no excuse now!!! (BTW, thanks for the contributions received) --

Now hosted at

Contributions

If you want to contribute with ideas and/or code, you can reach me at ediaz@tsc.uvigo.es.