Email Archiving

E-mail archiving is the systematic approach to protecting and saving the e-mail messages containing relevant data so that they can be accessed at a later stage for future use. E-mail archiving is such an IT application that is complete in itself, and it runs independently. The e-mail archiving application works in sync with an e-mail server.

Why is e-mail archiving required?

Since used as one of the major business communication tools in most organizations these days, e-mail needs to be retained properly in order to secure all the communications carried out by the employees of any organization. You never know when you require to pull out an e-mail conversation with your client or an entire communication you had with you r colleague on some work-related issue. The basic requirements for application of the e-mail archiving tool are listed below:

• Enabling users that send and receive thousands of e-mail messages throughout the day to have unlimited mailbox capacity and easy access to the oldest of mails.
• To increase the size limit for e-mail archiving by offloading data from the production e-mail server.
• To enable legal and compliance officers to search archived e-mails easily.
• To increase the storage efficiency while preserving access to the end users.

Whatever it is, you just cannot afford to lose a single e-mail and this requirement makes it a necessity to archive emails the right way.

How does e-mail archiving work? How many e-mails can be archived?

It is the e-mail server that helps manage all the e-mail messages of an organization. All data is captured by the e-mail server even before it reaches the other person (the recipient) and is stored in a single and centrally located e-mail archival and analysis system. The server is centrally managed so that it can be quickly accessed in the future. The analysis and e-mail archiving system have search tools embedded within them for the purpose of searching thousands of e-mail records within seconds in case of any internal investigation or any legal discovery.

Also before storing the data, the e-mail archival software filters the e-mails through anti-spam and anti-virus to ensure only clean e-mails enter the system. Once archived the data is only accessible to a limited number of people like the system administrators, managers and in few cases some users who are permitted to search and retrieve their own e-mail messages.

Now the question of how many e-mails can be archived can be answered based on the fact that what exactly is the type of e-mail archival. If it is a hosted e-mail archiving process, then the storage capacity and resource requirements are all taken care of by the service provider, commonly known as the EAM (Email Archiving and Management) vendor. And another option is to own one’s own e-mail archiving set-up within the data center. However, this would require manpower to manage the whole set-up and an additional cost for the extra storage capacity. The EAM vendors cover a whole lot of subsets of business issues like – storage optimization, messaging system optimization, e-mail back-up and disaster recovery, monitoring internal and external e-mail content and many more related stuff. A similar set of service is also provided by the e-mail archiving set-up arranged by an organization. These archival systems provide virtually unlimited storage capacity for your e-mail messages. Virtually because in case need be one can always add a new disk with additional storage. Therefore, there is practically no size limit for e-mail archiving as these systems are configured with as much storage as one desires!

Thus, you see, there is no limit as to how many emails can be archived!   

Benefits of e-mail archiving

Besides the fact that there is no size limit for e-mail archiving and how many ever e-mails can be archived as required, there are other significant benefits of e-mail archiving as well. The list below summarizes the benefits as follows:

• E-mail archiving significantly reduces the amount of time and effort spent by the administrators for performing recovery and back-up operations.
• E-mail archiving significantly reduces the amount of time and effort spent by the end-users while managing their e-mail messages like organizing and retrieving the ones deleted accidentally.
• E-mail archiving is a real life saver in cases of virus breakouts when the users in an organization loose all their e-mail messages.
• Archiving the e-mail messages in an organization also helps monitoring the usage (or misuse) of the e-mail by the employees, which is supposed to be unethical.
• Last, but not the least, almost all the e-mail archiving set-ups help archiving instant message conversations which is a great advantage as IM is being widely used as an official tool for client interactions.

Organizations should look for an appropriate vendor to implement a solid e-mail archival system in order to run a smooth and hassle-free business.