This article in my series about email archiving is about how to access the archive. Perhaps these are most important features of an email archiving solution. After all, the main reason for archiving emails is to search for and retrieve them.

Indexing

In my last post in this series, I mentioned that email archiving tools store emails in different ways. This may also influence their search capabilities. Every email consists of different parts: sender, recipient, subject, date, categories, etc. I think it is important for the tool to allow you to limit the search to any of these fields. Of course, it should also be possible to perform a full text search in the email’s body.

The most difficult part to index is definitely the attachment. Most attachments are sent as MS Office or PDF files. But there are many other important formats such as the OASIS Open Document Format, Open Office formats, HTML, XML, etc. The more formats the email archiving product supports, the better. Another problem is that the attachments are often compressed. The email archiving tool must be able to understand the different compression formats to be able to index all attachments. Furthermore, it is important that new formats can be added and that the email archiving vendor updates its software regularly.

Search functions

Searching in private data is much more difficult than searching the whole web. This might sound contradictory because the web is the biggest full text resource we have. However, one has to consider that the whole web community helps Google and Co. to organize the web by interlinking web pages. Before Google entered the scene, most search engines had more sophisticated search capabilities, but Google’s famous ranking algorithm made them obsolete. Since I am working in a library, I am often confronted with archiving tools with lousy search capabilities. I call this the Google effect.

Many take Google as an example, trying to keep the search interface as simple as possible. As outlined above, this works perfectly on the web, but not for isolated archives. Hence, if I had to choose an email archiving solution, I would attach great importance to the search capabilities. An archiving tool should support all kinds of logical operators with the possibility to group search terms. Perhaps the proximity operator is most important when it comes to full text search. Google doesn’t have it because proximity is a factor in their ranking algorithm.

Access tools

Another important question is what kind of tools you can use to access the archive databases. If you introduce an email archiving solution because you want to keep your email server’s database lean, it is important that end-users can easily access the archive. The best way is if they can use their email client, which will be Outlook in most cases. This way, end-users don’t have to learn to use a new tool and administrators don’t have to deploy and manage another client. If Outlook Web Access is used in your organization, you might want to ensure that the email archiving tool supports it.

The downside is that Outlook’s search capabilities are somewhat limited. At first glance, the advanced search interface looks quite powerful because it allows you to combine all kinds of search operations via a well-thought-out user interface. However, I really miss the proximity operator and the OR operator only works within criteria (From Mary OR Bob), but you can’t use it to tie criteria (From Mary OR to Bob). However, if end-user access to the archive is a priority, then I would rather live with Outlook’s restricted search functions than introduce another tool. I think Microsoft has come to understand how important searching has become recently. Perhaps the next version of Outlook will have an improved search interface.

Retrieval

Once an email has been found, the next question is what kind of things you can do with it. Possible operations are search within the email, forward all hits, restore all hits to the email database, or erase them. It depends on the main purpose of the email archiving solution, but if end-user access is important, then it should be possible that they can restore emails from the archive without the help of an administrator.

Access control

Of course, only authorized personnel should be able to access all emails in the archive; especially if the archive serves a data pool for knowledge management tasks, it is important to be able to assign access rights to user groups. It might also be necessary to restrict access to certain parts of the archive. For example, your company’s policies might only allow that members of the accounts department have access to emails in the finance category. Sometimes you have to grant access rights to external persons, such as auditors.

Tamperproof

When it comes to compliance, one of the key features is that the email archive is tamperproof. There are many things one has to consider here. For instance, one has to ensure that an email is archived before an end-user gets the chance to manipulate it. Once an email is in the archive, it is still possible for someone with write-access to modify emails. Audit logs are one way to prevent unauthorized manipulations of the email archive. The most secure way is probably to work with hash codes.

Articles in this series:

Leave a Comment | Subscribe RSS | Newsletter