[Dovecot] Shredding instead of deleting

[Timo Sirainen]

On 14.9.2011, at 16.46, Mike Cardwell wrote:

> I have a wishlist item. Is there an appropriate place for me to post it?
> Basically, I would like to know that my email isn't recoverable from the
> local disk on the mail server after I delete it. So instead of just
> deleting the file from my Maildir, I'd like the option to exist for
> Dovecot to shred it.. Ie, overwrite the file with random data and/or
> null bytes before deletion. In the same way that GNU shred behaves:


Well, the choices are:

a) Patch Dovecot sources

b) Use a LD_PRELOAD library to override unlink()

c) Use a FUSE filesystem that replaces unlinks with shredding

d) Wait until I've finished making dbox code use lib-fs, and write a lib-fs wrapper plugin that replaces unlink()

I'm not anyway planning on distributing any of these solutions with Dovecot. It won't even work with newer copy-on-write filesystems (ZFS, BTRFS, etc.)