Using a modern email archive can do for you more than just a backup of the mailbox. On daily basis, businesses deal with full mailboxes, slow mail servers, or searching for important emails that cannot be found. It’s no wonder, then, that email archiving has long been a key component of information management and an integral part of a successful company’s IT strategy.
But before you implement email archiving software, you need to know which archiving strategy is best suited to your company’s needs.
Overview: The Different Email Archiving Strategies
Professional email archiving software allows businesses to choose between mailbox archiving and journaling, and even to combine the two methods.
- With mailbox archiving, all the emails in the users’ mailboxes or shared mailboxes (e.g. sales@samplecompany.com) are archived at regular intervals. This can take place either by accessing the email server directly on a centralized basis or by archiving the local email clients.
- With journaling (also known as journal archiving), all the emails are copied to the archiving system the moment they arrive at the email server, i.e. even before they appear in the user’s mailbox. The same goes for outgoing emails.
- A business may also decide to run both methods in tandem in order to benefit from certain aspects of each method.
What Is Mailbox Archiving?
With mailbox archiving, all the emails are extracted from the users’ mailboxes at regular intervals and copied to a central archive. Emails distributed across local systems (e.g. PST files stored on a users’ desktop) can also be transferred to the central archive. In addition, since the folder structures created by users in their own mailboxes can be mapped to the archive, they can continue working in their usual email environment.
A big advantage of mailbox archiving is that it allows specific rules to be defined which delete emails from a users’ mailbox once they’ve been archived. In the long run, this helps relieve the load on the email server, cut storage requirements, and resolve issues with mailbox quotas. However, users can still access their emails via the archive even after these have been deleted from the server.
This method of archiving entire user mailboxes does not, however, guarantee that you will ultimately have a complete, tamper-proof archive. A user could still delete or manipulate emails between archiving cycles. Likewise, external factors such as a cyber-attack could mean that emails are lost before they are archived.
What Is Journal Archiving (Journaling)?
If your archiving solution primarily needs to address issues such as legal security and compliance, then journal archiving is the right choice. With this method, all inbound and outbound mail traffic is archived before it becomes visible in the user mailboxes. You can rest assured that your emails are stored in a form that is complete, faithful to the original, tamper-proof, and also permanently available. This is a practical means for companies to meet the relevant legal requirements that can apply depending on the country and industry sector.
Also, having a complete email archive can play an important role in facilitating the use of email as evidence in litigation.
A potential downside of journaling is that the load on the email server isn’t reduced as this method does not support the definition of rules for automatically deleting emails from user mailboxes. Any emails already archived from the journal mailbox remain in the user mailboxes.
Also, journaling doesn’t allow the existing folder structures in user mailboxes to be mapped to the archive. Emails can only be assigned to the users in the archive as received or sent objects, with full retention of all access privileges.
If this information is helpful to you read our blog for more interesting and useful content, tips, and guidelines on similar topics. Contact the team of COMPUTER 2000 Bulgaria now if you have a specific question. Our specialists will be assisting you with your query.
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