This article is the first in a series about email archiving. In the coming articles, I will write about the benefits of email archiving and give some guidelines on how to find the best email archiving product for your organization.

A recent study conducted by GFI in the UK established that only 49% of SMBs implemented email archiving. I must admit that I have also been putting off this topic for quite some time already. Systems that seem not to contribute directly to productivity are often neglected in IT. Security, backup and all kinds of archiving tasks belong to this seemingly non-productive group. I hope that after reading this series, you will realize that there are many reasons why introducing email archiving will increase productivity in IT and in your organization in general. In fact, it will also reduce costs.

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I must admit that I am surprised about the number of benefits email archiving has to offer. It has taken me three posts to cover everything I encountered during my research. This is the last article about the benefits; in the next posts I will write about the features that are important for email archiving products.

Disaster recovery

An email archiving solution can’t replace conventional backups. For disaster recovery you will still require a backup of the complete database. However, if you are responsible for backups in your organizations, you know how unreliable they are. Thus, if the latest backup of the email database is corrupt, you at least have a copy of all emails. After you have reinstalled your email server, you can restore emails from the archive to the email database. I think you will sleep much better, if you know that emails are secured at two different locations. Furthermore, during the disaster recovery process users will still have access to their old emails through the email archiving system.

Storage costs

Storage costs are falling continuously. But the amount of data on our servers is growing at the same pace. A considerable amount of storage capacity is obviously needed to store email with attachments for ten years or more. Some email archiving solutions store only a single instance of an attachment if the same file has been sent to multiple mailboxes. Because attachments usually occupy the most space, this can save a substantial amount of storage capacity.

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In the last post in this series I discussed the organizational benefits of email archiving. I suppose that for most organizations, they are the most important reasons for introducing an email archiving solution. However, in my view, the technical benefits are not less important. Email archiving improves the overall stability of your email system and can help to reduce costs. In this post I will discuss PST files and backup. In the next post in this series I will cover disaster recovery, performance, and stability.

PST files

Many organizations still have quotas for their email systems. The consequence of this is that many end users use Outlook’s archiving features to store old emails in a PST file on their PC. This archiving method has many disadvantages. The archive is only available on the user’s PC and can’t be accessed easily by other employees. Usually, there are no backups, and a simple hard disk crash can destroy emails encompassing several years. However, if you allow users to store their PST files on file shares or in roaming user profiles, you just move the storage problem from your email server to your file servers.

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In my upcoming posts I will cover all the important features that an email archiving software can possibly have. As noted before, you can use this feature list to decide what kind of email archiving solutions fit best with your environment and your needs. As things stand now, there will be three posts about these possible features. Today I will discuss the features that are relevant to the archiving process. In the next posts I will cover storage-related, access-related, and technical features.

Server-based archiving

Server-based archiving means that an email is archived immediately after it is received by the SMTP server. Large organizations with many email servers can especially benefit from this feature because the email archiving software can intercept emails before they are delivered to the server where the user’s mailbox is stored. This can improve performance because the email archiving software doesn’t have to scan all of the email servers for new emails. Another important advantage of server-based archiving is that end users can’t delete emails before the email archiving software gets a chance to store them away.

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This is my second post about the features of email archiving software. Yesterday, I discussed the features that are related to the archiving process. Today I will focus on the different ways emails are stored by archiving tools.

As files or in a database

There are email archiving solutions that only store the metadata in a database. The email bodies and the attachments are saved as files. It is also possible for only the attachments to be stored separately. Perhaps this method is safer when it comes to long-term archiving because one is not dependent on the database software. Who knows if its vendor will still exist in 20 years? However, search performance might be better if everything is stored in a database.

Whole object or individual parts

This topic is related to the one above. Emails can be archived in one piece or each part of an email (header/body/attachment) can be stored separately. Obviously, you have more search options if the email archiving solution is able to distinguish between the different parts of an email.

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Last updated: April 24, 2009

I hope my three previous articles about the benefits of email archiving have convinced you that this is an interesting topic. In the upcoming posts in this series, I will discuss the features of different archiving solutions. Prior to that, I will publish a list of all email archiving tools of which I am aware. I also want to take this opportunity to make a few remarks about the value of this series.

Some of you might have expected that I would review some email archiving products or compare them in a feature chart. However, I think it is more useful to list the features that are relevant when it comes to email archiving. Comparison charts are usually outdated before you even finish testing all products. To maintain an up-to-date chart requires considerable resources which I don’t have. Comparisons that reflect the market situation at a certain point in time made sense in the print world. Once the magazine is published, it is of interest for a few weeks only. After that, it is only waste paper.

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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.

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This is the last article in my series about email archiving features; however, I will probably conduct a new survey concerning email archiving. Today, I will discuss some technical considerations that must be taken into account when introducing an email archiving solution. In particular, I will consider email archiving services, appliances, email systems, and enterprise features.

The first issue to consider before you begin evaluating email archiving solutions is whether you want to buy and install the software yourself, or employ an email archiving service. Since the cloud computing hype will probably reach its peak in 2009, I believe many will take the latter way. It is an attractive solution due to the time and effort that is saved.

Email archiving services

In the course of my career, I have outsourced many IT solutions to larger computer centers. What seems simple initially can cause many technical problems. In this case, you not only have to ensure that all emails are routed to the service provider, but you also have to synchronize the user databases. This is necessary to enable end-users to restore emails by themselves. Most time consuming are those cases where an end-user cannot access the service and you don’t see any technical problem on your side, but the service provider purports that everything works just fine. We have to deal with such incidences every day, and I can tell you, it is not fun.

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For the time being, this article may be the last one in my series about email archiving. Perhaps I will add a few notes about GFI MailArchiver at a later date, because I will review this product for a German magazine. Even though I didn’t review an email archiving tool in this series, I think that the benefits of email archiving were clear.

Since I probably influenced many with this series, I don’t expect this poll to be representative. However, I think that the results could still be interesting. I already was planning to introduce an email archiving solution in my organization, mostly because I didn’t like the fact that our email backups only lasted for a relatively short time period. For most organizations compliance is probably the most important reason for introducing an email archiving software. But since, I have looked at the features of email archiving tools, and it has become clear that the technical benefits are most interesting from an administrator’s point of view.

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