Email archiving is a stand-alone IT application that integrates with an enterprise email server, such a Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino. In addition to simply accumulating email messages, these applications index and provide quick, searchable access to archived messages independent of the users of the system using a couple of different technical methods of implmentation. The reasons a company may opt to implement an email archiving solution include protection of mission critical data, record retention for regulatory requirements or litigation, and reducing production email server load.

The Basics of Email Archiving

The core function of an email archiving application is to capture and preserve all email traffic flowing into and out of the email server so it can be accessed quickly at a later date from a centrally-managed location. There are email archiving applications to support most major email messaging systems, and they can be installed in-house or they can be outsourced to a hosted service.

In addition to email and attachments, some email archiving applications can also archive additional aspects of a mailbox including public folders, offline PST files, calendars, contacts, notes, and associated metadata and context. Email archiving applications accomplish the capture of email content on magnetic disk storage in one of two methods. One method is to capture email directly from the email application itself. (e.g. Microsoft Exchange, IBM Domino, Novell GroupWise, Sendmail, Imail, Zimbra, Communigate). The alternative method captures email content during transport via an agent installed at network gateway.

At a business mission level there are two key approaches to using EAM (Email Archiving and Management) technology:

• As a part of your messaging infrastructure and storage activities
• As an essential compliance and legal business application

Both approaches can be complex, and in some cases, may be industry-specific. Law firms, for example, use EAM technology very differently than manufacturing companies. Furthermore, individual enterprises have unique needs.

Email Archiving solutions can be delivered in different models: 1) Hosted or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) 2) Package software on customer premises 3) Appliance on customer premises.

Objectives of Email Archiving

EAM vendors tend to focus on a subset of business problems, rather than offer a truly comprehensive product

• Regulatory compliance
• Litigation and Legal Discovery
• E-mail backup and disaster recovery
• Messaging system & storage optimization
• Monitoring of internal and external e-mail content
• Building a corporate archive

Regulatory Compliance

As organisations grow so does the reliance on information systems, particularly email solutions. To protect this valuable information, standards and regulations have been adopted. A suitable email archiving system allows companies to meet regulatory, and/or business records retention standards.

Litigation and Legal Discovery

For legal discovery, email archiving solutions will lower overall risk of email loss and alteration and greatly speed up the discovery function because of their message indexing, audit capabilities, deduplication and protection of all email messages stored in the archive. For litigation support, email can be retrieved quickly and a history of the email exists to prove its authenticity. For compliance support, email records are stored in the archive according to administrator defined retention policies. When retention periods expire, emails can automatically be deleted.

Without email archiving, it is likely that emails exists on combinations of backup tapes and on  users’ local workstations in the form of a PST backup. If a specific email needs to be found for an internal investigation or in response to litigation, it can take weeks to find and costs could be high.  In some regions compliance legislations, has become a requirement for IT departments to centrally manage by archiving their organisation’s email.

E-mail backup and disaster recovery

In order to survive, most enterprises today depend on high volumes of e-mail running efficiently through their systems. Virtually all enterprises require that messaging be a part of the underlying IT infrastructure. Many decision-makers describe systems such as Microsoft’s Exchange as the single most important communication and business application within their organisation.

In the e-commerce arena, employees must have access to e-mail to close sales and to manage accounts. These types of employees, plus many other types, often want to keep their e-mails indefinitely, but some organisations mandate that e-mails more than 90 days old be deleted. Deleting older e-mails is foolish because the one e-mail that might help a company win a law suit might be nonexistent. Also, any email that is successfully delivered has two copies, the sender and the recipient. Any e-mail sent or received outside the company will probably still exist, even if the company has deleted it on their own side.

Messaging system & storage optimisation

Every email message takes up space on a email system's hard drive or some other permanent storage device (e.g. Network Attached Storage, Storage Area Network, etc). As the size of these messages increase, simple operations such as retrieving, searching, indexing, backup, etc take utilise more information system resources. At some point older data must be removed from the production email system so that they can maintain a level of performance for their primary use, exchange of email messages. Email archiving solutions improve email server performance and storage efficiency by removing email and attachments from the messaging server based on administrator defined policies. Archived email and attachments remain accessible to end users via the existing email client applications.