Providing Email Archives for Home-Based Employees to Use

Access Your Email Archive While Working from Home

With only a few small changes, you can make your email archive accessible to remote employees. The reason for this is that the MailStore Server software was designed from scratch as a zero-network service. In your corporate network, it's already freely accessible from desktop computers at workstations. However, this is likely not the case for remote workstations, as the Internet - transmission medium - would act as a barrier. As you might expect, any router or Internet gateway in a company would be configured to prevent incoming requests (i.e., those coming from the Internet) from being directed to internal computers and servers.

Technical background: This involves a process known as masking. The router or Internet gateway forwards requests from computers to the outside world and then routes the relevant responses back to the computers. From the outside, it appears as though the requests are generated by the gateway itself.

Requests originating from outside the company that do not respond to ongoing sessions within the company will be rejected outright. However, a request to access MailStore Server from home is an external communication request, and in our case, it must be explicitly allowed.

Two Ways to Make an Internal Service Accessible from the Outside

There are two ways to make an internal service accessible from outside the company: you can use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel to allow client computers to establish a virtual presence within the company network or you can make MailStore Server generally accessible on the router and firewall.

Let's look at the pros and cons of each method.

Availability via a VPN

Here, an external client computer uses a VPN client to connect to the company's VPN server. Once the connection is successfully established, an encrypted tunnel is created. The tunnel acts like a virtual network cable that allows the client computer to connect to the company's local network within a predefined context. Now, for example, the email archive can be accessed via the MailStore Client, Outlook Add-in, integrated IMAP Server, or WebAccess.

To use a VPN, the company must have a VPN server. This can be a service installed separately on a server. However, nowadays many routers and Internet gateways have their own local VPN services.

Now, to address the VPN server, your Internet connection must be assigned a fixed IPv4 address by your provider or a reliable dynamic DNS service must be selected to continuously direct the chosen name to your company's correct public IPv4 address. According to this, the router and firewall must also be configured to allow requests from outside the company.

If these services are integrated into the router, this usually happens when the VPN is configured; if it's a separate VPN server, port forwarding and firewall rules will be required.

Pros and Cons:

• AVPN connection can be provided on a highly specific basis for individuals
• An existing VPN tunnel can be used by multiple other corporate IT services at the same time
• AVPN will also hide the real services provided behind the curtain
• Depending on the product, aVPN offers free access to leading encryption methods
• The connection to the MailStore server is encrypted by theVPN twice - since aVPN needs to be installed and maintained on client machines for specific employees, this may mean extra work for the administrator in cases of spontaneous access and personnel changes

Making MailStore Server Accessible to Everyone via Port Forwarding

Alternatively, MailStore Server can be made accessible to everyone without aVPN. With this approach, the required ports for MailStore Server are forwarded on the router/gateway (known as port forwarding), so that requests to the public address are directed to the internal server. If this is configured automatically by the router, the permissions for these ports may also need to be set on the firewall. In this case, the client PC directly accesses the public address without additional software and then reaches MailStore Server via port forwarding.

To guarantee optimal security, MailStore Server only communicates through SSL-encrypted connections, which means that it is protected against tampering not only internally but also for Internet-based communication. Ideally, a fixed IPv4 address or at least a fixed DNS name that continuously points to the correct IP address using dynamic DNS is required, just as in theVPN case.

We recommend that you use an official, trusted certificate for MailStore Server so that users can verify they are truly communicating with the desired MailStore server and not being rerouted through trickery. If you already have a public DNS name, it will allow you to use Let's Encrypt-certificates™, which are both free and officially trusted, unlike many paid certificates.

Pros and Cons:

• Everyone can access their personal archive after it is set up
• No special installation is required on the client PC, only the login data of the MailStore Server user and the server URL
• Accessible from various end devices without the need for specificVPN clients (i.e., potential devices in the company network such as smartphones, tablets, Linux and MacOS X PCs)

• People connecting to MailStore WebAccess from outside the company can see which service is responding through the user interface (although a real login without user data is not possible)
• The machine running MailStore Server is accessible to everyone through the selected ports

In Conclusion:

Both ways lead to Rome! No matter which one you choose, both ensure that employees can access their archives from outside the company. WhileVPN provides a more robust solution offering significant leverage for administrators, the direct, public approach is more flexible and requires less maintenance from the administrator once it's set up.

By applying one of the solutions above, you can provide your colleagues who are currently facing a longer WFH (working from home) spell with a secure way to remotely access their archives. If you have any technical issues during the setup of remote access, our support team is always ready to provide you with advice and help, both during the trial phase and after purchasing MailStore Server.

Source: Making Your Email Archive Available to Employees Working From Home (mailstore.com)