Email archiving is usually a IT application that resides on a dedicated server or appliance and integrates with an email server, such a Microsoft Exchange. In addition to simply storing the email messages, the application ingests the emails into a database and indexes them to provide a searchable data repository that can be searched independently of email server.

The reasons that an organisation may adopt an email archiving solution include protection of mission critical data, record retention for regulatory requirements or legal discovery, and reducing the load on email servers.

Email Archiving captures all email traffic to and from an organisations email server and makes these emails available for searching usually through a email client plugin. More sophisticated applications will de-duplicate “on the fly” thus making best use of available storage. In addition, better archiving systems will apply rules to the emails being archived to apply email shortcuts, retention and deletion policies. For compliance purposes, archived emails should be captured at the moment they are delivered to the email server’s database, otherwise they may be deemed to be non-compliant.

Typically most organisations will opt for email archiving solutions to reduce the size of the email server database and to overcome the burden of having to managing mailbox limits and sizes. Once emails have been archived, messages can usually be stored on Tier 1 magnetic disk, or alternatively, lower cost Tier 2 storage appliances can be used, such as NAS or optical library appliances.

In addition to email and attachments, some email archiving applications can also archive additional aspects of a mailbox including public folders, pst files, calendars, contacts and notes

Reasons of Email Archiving

There are many reasons why organisations would implement an email archiving solution, these would include:

Regulatory Compliance

Organisations are becoming more and more reliant on information systems, particularly email. To protect this valuable information, standards and regulations are being introduced to enforce email retention periods and to ensure that access to legal information can be achieved in a timely fashion. A suitable email archiving system allows companies to meet regulatory, and/or business records retention requirements.

It is also worth noting that many of the compliance regulations require the preservation of "electronic business communications" which, not only consists of not only email, but may include instant messaging, file attachments and other electronic messaging communications used in business.

Legal Discovery

For legal discovery purposes, an email archiving solution will lower overall risk and greatly speed up the discovery function because of the message indexing, audit capabilities, deduplication and protection of all email messages stored in the archive. For litigation purposes, emails can be retrieved quickly and a history of the email exists to prove its authenticity. For compliance purposes, email records are stored in the archive according to defined retention policies. When retention periods expire, the archiving application can be configured to automatically delete the expired emails

Without an email archiving solution and if a need arises to recover a specific email or a range of emails by user, by date or emails with a specific subject, this would become a very long laborious and costly task, as a manual process would involve possible tape backup restoration, searching individual users mailboxes. This process may take weeks to complete and may not be completely successfully. With today’s legal discovery rules and compliance legislations, it has become necessary for IT departments to centrally manage and archive their organization’s email, so email can be searched and found in minutes; not days or weeks.

E-mail backup and disaster recovery

Organisations today heavily rely on e-mail running efficiently and reliably. Backing up emails servers without an archiving solution can be difficult to accomplish due to windows of time available in order to complete the backup. An email archiving solution not only overcomes legal discovery and compliances regulations but also reduces the size of the mail database allowing full backups to be taken, furthermore in the event of a disaster the archives can serve as a restoration point and users emails can easily be restored.

Storage optimisation

Every email message takes up space on an email system's hard drive or some other permanent storage device. 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 defined policies. Archived email and attachments remain accessible to end users via the existing email client applications.