IMF Archive Management Tools

Alexander Zammit

Software Development Consultant. Involved in the development of various Enterprise software solutions. Today focused on Blockchain and DLT technologies.

IMF Archive Manager (IMFASP)

The second tool in our menu is also named IMF Archive Manager. We will hereafter call this IMFASP because of this being an ASP application.

IMFASP was made publicly available by the Hellomate MS Exchange Blog here:
http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange/2004/06/imf_archive_man.html

This little application provides remote access to the Archive folder giving it a valuable advantage over the others. The application has to be installed manually and configuration must be done by editing directly the ASP code. However this process is well documented in the included readme.doc and should not take more than a few minutes.

The application certainly has a more primitive interface however it does provide all the key features. We can Delete, Resubmit and View the raw email content.

IMFcompanion

The third IMF archive management tool is IMFcompanion available from: http://stoekenbroek.com/imfcompanion/default.htm

IMFcompanion provides a proper MSI installation that simply involves clicking Next, Next, Next. Once installed, we need to configure the directories just like we did for IMFAM. We do this from File | Folder.

The interface is similar but richer than that of IMFAM. We have a list view at the top. Beneath it is a split view with a tree on the left and the email content on the right. Clicking on the tree nodes shows different parts of email information with the root node showing the entire raw email content.

IMFcompanion is certainly the most feature rich of the three. To explore its functionality it is best to start from Tools | Options. The General page shows application information, whereas the Directories page again provides for configuring the pickup and archive paths. More interesting are the other three property pages.

The Filtering page allows us to configure a view. This determines which emails the list displays. The view can then be turned on/off using the button at the vertical toolbar.

The Toleration page allows us to setup a sender whitelist. IMFcompanion can then automatically scan the archive and resubmit emails matching this list.

The Settings configuration page adds the ability to open emails in Outlook Express instead of using the default raw email viewer.

Going to Tools | Cleansing Wizard we find a tool to quickly delete old emails. This is handy in case we did not verify the archive folder for sometime. In such a case reviewing old email may become pointless or too time consuming.

Getting back to the main configuration interface, the vertical toolbar provides buttons for deleting and resubmitting emails. We also find buttons to quickly add senders to the whitelist, turn the view on/off, and to launch the Cleansing Wizard. A search button is also included that allows for searching emails by Date, Size, To, From and Subject.

Stress Testing

I could not conclude this article unless I checked the most common complaint leveled at these tools. This is their inability to handle a large number of files. So I dumped thousands of emails to disk and checked what happened.

With IMFAM v2.0.5 I was able to load up to 80000 emails (did not try more). The application took around 15 minutes to start and memory consumption touched a peak of around 700MB. Once started memory went down to 150MB. Refreshing the email list sometimes took a couple of minutes. Overall the refresh delays made the application almost unusable.

With a load of 40000 emails IMFAM gave respectable results. The application still took over 10 minutes to load, touching a memory peak of 500MB and stabilizing on 100MB. However thereafter, the going was smooth. Refreshes only took a few seconds at most.

IMFCompanion immediately failed with a load of 40000 emails reporting an overflow error. With 20000 emails the first loading and subsequent refreshes took around 30 seconds each. Memory consumption was around 50MB and did not exhibit any large peaks as IMFAM did. However IMFCompanion took much longer to refresh than IMFAM, despite the latter was handling twice the load.

IMFASP timed-out on loading 10000 emails. So I increased the script timeout limit from 90 to 900 seconds. Retrying loading the page led to a "Buffer Limit Exceeded" error. So I tried 5000 emails that loaded ok, without requiring the timeout tweak.

In my opinion the load level IMFAM is able to handle is reasonable, especially if we are patient enough to wait for it to load. If the archive directory is ending flooded with emails, this probably means one of two things. Either the directory is not being moderated often enough, or our email load requires more advanced tools.

One such tool is IMF Tune. For example this tool allows us to be more selective in what we archive. We could archive emails with SCLs 5 to 7, and reject emails with SCLs 8 to 9. This drastically cuts the number of archived emails without posing a serious risk of missing any valid ones. Another useful feature is the automatic backup and purging of old archives.