Email Archiving

The main reasons for an organization to archive its email can be divided into 4 classes. These are: Compliance, litigation support, storage management and knowledge management. In the present-day corporate world, most companies archive the emails of their users for legal and business reasons.

There are quite a number of e-mail archiving tools that are available in the market – so that companies have a range of choices from which they can select the system they ideally require. It is extremely necessary to know, while evaluating one particular system, how well it is suited for the specific needs of the system it is meant to protect.

Companies, in general, need to take into consideration several issues before they can zero-in on a certain archiving system with the confidence of it being the best fit for their requirements. Some such factors are:

• Archive Completeness: Certain companies require only messages received or sent from the outside has to be preserved. However, there are many which need complete email messages; for them, the archive has to interact with a server for ensuring that all messages, eternal as well as internal are retained.

Email archiving systems can be “complete”, and yet some loopholes remain through which some mails are lost. A “double delete” scenario, where both the sender and the recipient getting rid of the message is often desirable. Compliance focused organizations need to ensure that each message is retained in the email archive.

• Recording Actions of users: Some extremely advanced email archiving systems can record whether the user has opened, forwarded, filed or flagged the email. These are indeed one step ahead of the afore-mentioned “complete” systems.
  Actions taken by users are rather difficult to record. These actions (also known as user-action meta data) have to be recorded by exchange journaling (that uses MAPI technology). Companies needing such records have to opt for systems that sweep through the mail system to capture such data.
• Access to PST files or mail store: Often, the messages that were there before the archiving system was installed. If a company indeed has such requirements, it can opt for the correspondingly suitable system.
  An intensive migration process using the MAPI protocol is required to retrieve old messages from a mail server. Generally, these messages are from the mail system that includes more than a decade of emails, and also from ser-archives or offline such as PST files created from Microsoft's Outlook.
  Email clients have to be first located and consolidated; not every system can achieve this. Clients keep personal archives at local disks, ranging from network shares, desktops to even portable drives. The archiving system must be equipped to capture such data.
  If companies give e-discovery a high priority, archives containing historical messages has to be flagged for being potentially unreliable and incomplete. Personal archives and email servers almost certainly miss a great many messages, and the stored data might also be manipulated.
• Handling multiple email systems: This feature could prove critical if a company has a number of email systems in use or more than one email server is present. Not al email archiving products can handle many email servers. In this scenario, archives using messaging gateway should be opted for. In such heterogenous company environment, are far more flexible than those integrating directly with a mail system.
  Organisations created from corporate mergers generally require this type of archiving systems. However, historical reasons also play a part in their choice.
• Non-message content retaining: While email is certainly the most important component in archiving, the legal departments of companies might also decree that non-message content also need to be retained. There are a few archiving systems that support content that is outside the email, including system of files, instant messages and database applications. These systems are ideal in such environments. They preserve these data as additions over archiving messages, calendar items, tasks and contacts.
• Eliminating “Underground Archives”: This is often one of the primary goals of several email archiving works, but this often becomes difficult to accomplish. For this purpose, the Outlook’s PST archive help needs to be turned off and kept that way till existing archives can be ingested and located.

User can also change the content of one of these personal offline archives, creating new messages, or deleting or modifying old ones, thereby rendering old archives incomplete. Also, they selectively save email, delete a few, keep a few in the inbox and archive just a few. Hence, old archives are, generally, not reliable.

 

In addition to the factors mentioned above, there is another extremely important consideration that companies need to keep in mind while choosing a system: its cost. Reputation, customer service and geographic support coverage also need to be given appropriate attention before selecting a particular email archiving system.