Email archiving is a stand-alone IT application or service that integrates with an enterprise email server. In addition to archiving email messages, these applications index and provide access to archived messages independent of the users. Reasons to implement email archiving include protection of mission critical data, record retention for regulatory requirements or litigation, and reducing production email server load.
The core function of an archiving application is to capture and preserve all email traffic flowing into and out of the server so it can be accessed at a later date from a centrally-managed location. In addition to email and attachments, archiving applications can also archive additional aspects of a mailbox including public folders, offline PST files, calendars, contacts, notes, and associated data. Archiving applications accomplish the capture of email content on disk storage in one of two methods:
• Capture email directly from the email application itself
• Capture email during transport via an agent installed at a network gateway
At a business mission level there are two key approaches to using EAM (Email Archiving and Management) technology:
• As a part of your messaging infrastructure and storage
• As an essential compliance and legal business application
Specific objectives of an archiving system most often include
• E-mail backup and disaster recovery
• Messaging system & storage optimization
• Building a corporate archive
• Regulatory compliance
• Litigation and Legal Discovery
• Spooling messages for later delivery during maintenance and downtime
Messaging system & storage optimization
As the size of messages taking up space on a business’s permanent storage increases, simple operations such as retrieving, searching, indexing, backup, etc take up a larger portion of information system resources. At some point, older data must be removed from the production email system to maintain a level of performance for their primary use. Email archiving solutions improve server performance and storage efficiency by removing email and attachments from the messaging server based on administrator defined policies. Archived mail and attachments remain accessible to end users via the existing email client applications.