Email Archiving

E-mail is the buzz word nowadays in any business, be it IT or a non-IT organization. Besides being one of the major tools of communication, e-mail is now used as important documents like invoices, offers etc. even a few years ago important documents such as business contracts were sent through fax which are these days simply done through a single e-mail! Thus the requirement of e-mail archiving arises.

What is e-mail archiving? What is an e-mail archiving tool?

With the increasing importance of e-mails in almost everywhere, a genuine requirement of securing and preserving the important e-mails has developed. This preservation of e-mails is technically known as e-mail 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. This e-mail server is the place where the archived e-mails are exactly stored. The e-mail server is placed in a centrally located area wherefrom it can be easily accessed and managed as well.

What is a Linux OS? How is it beneficial to e-mail archiving?

Linux is essentially a computer operating system that is well-known for its use in servers. A Linux operating system majorly finds its use in the servers and is also installed on a number of computer hardware. Linux Operating systems are being adopted for business-critical applications of which e-mail archiving software application is our subject of concern. This development has even stimulated the requirements and thus innovative technologies previously unseen in Linux environment are present now. The messaging and integration products of the Linux environment are the WebSphere MQ and WebSphere BI Message Broker which perform e-mail archiving services through the hierarchical storage management.

What is a Mac Operating system? How is it beneficial to email archiving?

MAC Operating System is a brand name for a series of graphical user-interface based operating systems. Mac OS X server is developed by Apple. Mac OS X is a Unix based tool and hence there is are a lot of freely-available open source software that can be downloaded and used. The software also include virus- filtering tool so as to ensure a mail server clean of viruses. this MAC X server even manages, rather blocks, disables and even removes any kind of unwanted or bad content in the outgoing and incoming e-mails.

Yes, e-mail archiving tools can be run on both Linux and Mac Operating Systems. Archiving emails can be carried out.

Why at all we need e-mail archiving?

Since emails are used as one of the principal business communication tools in most organizations these days, e-mails needs to be retained properly in order to secure all the communications carried out. You never know when you may be needed to pull out an e-mail conversation with your client or an entire communication you had with your 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 hundreds 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.

Benefits of e-mail archiving systems

The benefits of running e-mail archiving tools on the Linux and Mac O S are manifold. They solve the space constraint by pulling out old, unwanted e-mails, removing large and heavy attachments, and repetitive messages among multiple e-mail servers. the stored e-mails are rather placed in an easily accessible location that can be accessed instantly from anywhere on earth! The archived e-mails though appear to be residing in the e-mail server are actually moved to the archived folder somewhere else, thereby speeding up the e-mail server back ups!

Storage options of the archived e-mails

The e-mail archiving tools run on the Linux and Mac OS can be stored in different ways like as files, as a whole or in individual parts. Certain e-mail archiving solutions store the e-mail bodies and attachments as files. Other e-mail archiving tools archive the e-mails as a whole or in parts such as header, body and attachment. This again allows more search options provided the e-mail archiving tool is able to distinguish between the different parts of the e-mail.

Therefore, the requirement of a proper e-mail archiving system is desperately being felt so as to ward off any kind of trouble with the storage capacity with your system administrator who actually monitors all the incoming and outgoing e-mails through the server.