Mail Archiving
Today, corporate email has become a very important source of evidence in high profile court cases. Mail archiving is a separate IT application that works with an email server in managing, saving and protecting the data contained in email messages so it can be retrieved quickly at a later date. This systematic approach can have an organization search it's thousands of email records in a matter of seconds using the search tools that come with the mail archiving system and is especially helpful when past email is needed for internal investigations.
Due to the increasing importance of emails in corporate litigations, many IT departments have had to manage the company's entire email in bulk so that specific messages can be accessed within minutes. Mail archiving software applications allow the IT departments to manage large email archives, free up space on production servers and speed up backup times. Organizations use mail archiving for other reasons too such as for those who send and receive hundreds of emails daily to have unlimited mailbox capacity and access to historical email.
The way mail archiving works is that it captures the email content on magnetic disk storage in one of two ways. One way is by capturing email directly from the email application such as Microsoft Exchange or IBM Notes mail archiving and the second method captures email content whilst it is being transferred by an agent that is installed at the network agency, in other words referred to as the in-house function or the off-site service. The IT department administrator will set up rules for the life cycle management component. This way email messages will be classified into the ones that need to be archived, transfer the messages to the most efficient storage media and automatically delete the messages that are no longer needed.
Those who are worried about security typically go for the in-house setup which is more expensive as they pay for all of the equipment, software, support and storage which is why it is more often used by the bigger corporations who can afford it. Off-site hosting service is the most cost effective approach for smaller companies that can't afford to build the function within their IT department. Mail archiving off-site offers the end user to search their archives quickly because the archiving equipment is local and the company saves on storage costs. The in-house setup does take more time to set up than the off-site method; however both methods are useful approaches to mail archiving.