Email Archiving

Apart from becoming one of the major communication tools in the information technology business, e-mail has also graduated into one of the significant performance deciding factors that is a key to business success. Yes, not only proper business e-mail drafting but managing e-mails smartly as well plays a vital role today for a business and the employees who work there. And the first step of a proper e-mail management is archiving of e-mails.

What is e-mail archiving? What are the performance issues with 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 when the need so arises. E-mail archiving is an IT application that is complete in itself and it runs independently.

E-mail archiving solution has mainly three basic challenges to meet namely, e-mail storage management, regulatory compliance and legal litigations. Commonly the role of e-mail archiving is performed by the Microsoft exchange e-mail server.

Benefits of e-mail archiving

E-mail archiving directly and indirectly determines the performance of the end-users to such an extent that specific regulations have been set up by the organizations as the company’s e-mail compliance policies. The e-mail archiving based on the compliance policies is performed by the e-mail archiving software applications. These software applications have a handful of benefits which is directly related to the performance of the entire organization. The performance benefits of an organization from the e-mail archiving software applications are listed below in the bullet points:

• The policy-based e-mail archival software applications enable the IT managers to handle large e-mail archives.
• The space on production servers can be freed easily thereby speeding up the backup time.
• The policy-based e-mail archiving software applications also include search capabilities, indexing and even accessing logs that run a virtual search in case a particular e-mail is summoned irrespective of the nature of medium used to store them.
• These e-mail archiving software applications also have a lifecycle management component that actually monitors all the incoming e-mails of an organization, the rules being set up by the system administrator
• The life cycle management component is a very crucial part of the e-mail archiving software applications as it basically classifies the e-mail messages into sections as to which ones should go to the archive folder, and thereby transfer the e-mail messages to the most efficient and economical storage media
• Also the software applications help in deleting e-mail messages that are no more in use over a particular time span and thus not needed

Some real performance issues with wrongly archived e-mails

While intending to archive one’s e-mails, good care should be taken to the method of archiving. That is because a wrong method might aggravate the problem. A couple of examples will explain the situation:

• Some users often want to access old e-mails, and thus they create an offline folder for archiving that e-mail. These offline archives are again stored on the file server as the users still want it to be backed up. The archive folder actually takes more space to store an e-mail which could be stored in a single-instance by the e-mail servers.
• Another great downside of wrongly stored archived e-mails is that the important data are stored carelessly on ones’ desktop or without any back up or even the laptop which could be instead saved on the e-mail server and would have a proper back up as well.

The amazing performance that an e-mail archiving database demonstrates actually reduces the risk of database corruption. A corrupt database is the worst thing that can happen to any organization. And any method that minimizes the chances is considered to be a life saver. An e-mail archiving database not only secures the e-mails in one instance instead of loading another ten users’ offline archive but also reduces the risk of corruption. Also defragmenting the database and an integrity checking are much faster with the e-mail archiving software.

Some more technical benefits of e-mail archiving are those over the local storage means like PST folders and backups. The quota for-email storage in the outlook tends people to store old mails in a PST folder which has its own disadvantages like:

• a user’s PC cannot be accessed by other employees
• usually there are no back ups for the PST folders
• A simple crash of the hard disk would destroy all the data that needs to be sincerely managed
• the PST files stored on the file servers increase the back up time largely

Thus the requirement for a proper e-mail archiving system is badly called for to avoid unwanted scuffle for the storage capacity with your system administrator who actually monitors all the incoming e-mails through the server. Email archiving performance issues are important and they can make a critical difference.