Email Archiving

E-mail has been recognized as the primary business communication tool and therefore is a major business record. Therefore, it is a necessity for the management to manage all the e-mail information throughout their life-cycle. This is why storing emails has become so important. And a proper storage of the archived e-mails is very much vital for all businesses across any vertical industry. The archived e-mails are usually stored in the exchange server.

What is 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 which 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 they are easily accessed and managed as well.

What is an e-mail server? How does it work?

An e-mail sever is a host of several applications that are designed to process the e-mails sent by the client to the recipient. The recipient could be on the same server or the e-mail message is transported via external server computers. E-mail server is the den where the integrated applications of data sorting, delivering and even storage of mails are performed. The e-mail transmission requires a certain protocol. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the standard e-mail transmission protocol. However, the newly created protocols like POP3 (Post Office protocol Version 3) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) have become more popular than SMTP. The POP3 basically works by retrieving the e-mail message data from a remote server directly whereas the IMAP works similarly except that the end-user can still have the web sources available even when they are offline.

Email archiving products enhance the performance of email servers and their efficiency of storage by removing attachments and e-mails from a messaging server that is based on polices defined by an administrator.

It is the e-mail server that helps manage all the e-mail messages of an organization. All the 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.

The e-mail data is captured on the magnetic disk storage by the e-mail archiving applications. This is basically a hard disc where the e-mails are stored in the form of data. This data capturing can happen in two different ways. One is through capturing e-mails directly from an e-mail application and the other method is capturing e-mail content during the transport through an agent that is installed at the network gateway. The National Archives and Records Administrations (NARA) have provided new guidelines to agencies how they use e-mail archiving applications.

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.

Why is e-mail archiving required?

Being designated as the major business communication tool these days, e-mail is required to be retained properly to save the communications exchanged by the employees of any organization with its customers. You never know when you may be required to pull out an e-mail conversation with your customer 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 the end-users that receive and send thousands of e-mail messages throughout the day to get an unlimited capacity in the mailbox and ease of access to the oldest of mails.
• To increase the size limit for e-mail archiving by offloading data from production e-mail server.
• To enable legal and compliance officers to search archived e-mails easily.
• To increase the efficiency of storage when preserving the access for end users.

Last but not the least, choosing the right and appropriate e-mail server software is a real big deal. Some useful tips on how to select the right software for yourself are listed below:

• The e-mail server software is packed with specific services for business and personal requirements. Therefore, determine your need before you invest in one.
• Research on the internet to match your own application.
• The software you choose should be having the services you need.

Whatever it is, one simply cannot afford to lose a single e-mail and this requirement makes it a necessity to archive emails the right way, through the right e-mail server!