The Difficulty of Email Management

What is email archiving?

In 2017, 201 billion emails were sent and received worldwide every day. This number is expected to increase. It's not surprising that email has become the preferred method of communication over other methods like postal mail or fax. For many companies, seamless email data exchange has become essential. Every day, a vast amount of information is sent around the world, including invoices, contracts, and other related information. Just like an employee in a company, every email user is responsible for the content and processing of the data. According to this, email archiving can help with the systematic handling and filing of emails. Emails can be stored for a long time using email archiving. Email archiving primarily serves the purposes of documentation and preventing data loss. While doing this, emails are stored securely and their contents remain unchanged. If needed, emails can also be restored, ensuring that important content is not lost. An important principle to keep in mind is that the primary purpose of archiving is to ensure data is retained and made available for a longer period. Email archiving should also be an important component of an IT security strategy.

A Brief Look at the Evolution of Email Archiving

While you are reading this article, both of our email inboxes are constantly filling up. This has not always been the case. As time passes, email volumes grow and email archiving develops. In the early days of email, archiving was entirely dependent on users. Companies relied on their employees to manage their individual email archives within their email clients. Later, when IT departments introduced the concept of backup, they started backing up emails and even entire email servers, although searching for emails was not widespread—especially for end users. When you needed to restore a specific email, for example as evidence in legal proceedings, it often took weeks to find it. The IT staff had to restore all backups and search for this specific email, which was a tedious process. Today, end users can search for a single email within seconds and restore it on their own.

Different Types of Email Archiving

Client-side or server-side email archiving?

Have you decided to archive your emails? Then you should take the next step and learn the right strategy. In this context, a company's IT managers should focus on the internal email infrastructure. This means they need to choose between server-side or client-side archiving.

Server-side Email Archiving

Server-side archiving is a centralized, automatic archiving that operates independently of the end user. This type of email archiving is the most popular and archives mailboxes such as Exchange, Office 365, IMAP, and Gmail.

Client-side Email Archiving

Client-side archiving must be set up by the user themselves. According to this, the user is responsible for the archiving process. Client-side archiving is usually used with a POP3 mailbox. Here, a local email client (e.g., Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird) is used and the relevant folder structure is adopted. Generally, server-side archiving is the best strategy for a company to maintain control over all email communications, reduce the workload of the IT department, and comply with industry regulations and/or laws.

Internal Email Archiving or Cloud Archiving

After selecting the right type of email archiving for your email infrastructure and needs, you can choose between an on-premise or cloud solution. For an on-premise solution, software is purchased and run independently within the company's own server environment. This is an option if the company has its own IT department with internal email servers and its email server is in the cloud (e.g., Microsoft Office 365) but wants to keep the archive locally. If cloud services are used, maintenance and operation responsibilities fall on the provider. All data is located within the provider's system. If you choose to archive your emails only in the cloud, you should select maximum availability and security levels. Additionally, we recommend that you keep your email archive physically available on your own servers.

Due to the volume of emails sent and received every day, categorizing emails that require archiving and those that don't is almost impossible. Therefore, all incoming and outgoing emails are generally archived immediately ("journaling"). This is also useful for protection against possible tampering and ensuring the integrity of the archive. However, data protection guidelines should be taken into consideration here. For example, in some countries, the special use of business email services can be problematic. In such cases, a recommended solution would be to prohibit the exclusive use of external email services for personal email usage (as in a business contract) or for personal email correspondence. Therefore, you should always pay attention to data protection guidelines.

Six Advantages of Email Archiving

1) Compliance with Regulations

Emails can be stored for many years in an original, tamper-proof, and accessible manner with the help of email archiving. In addition, email archiving can also help in specific e-Discovery scenarios and make it easier for emails to be used as evidence in legal proceedings. Especially businesses in sectors subject to strict regulations such as healthcare, financial services, law, or government have an increasing list of regulatory and e-Discovery requirements to consider when managing their emails.

2) Protection Against Data Loss

Users can accidentally delete important emails, and even when they leave the company and all their mailboxes are deleted, critical data for the company is lost. With email archiving, every email, along with its attachments, remains available and searchable within an archive. Furthermore, what happens if a disaster occurs? Imagine your email server going offline or your email service provider experiencing a longer outage period. With a properly functioning email archive, all business emails are at your fingertips and available for your IT staff without difficulty.

3) Elimination of Mailbox Quotas

We've all been there: Microsoft Outlook informs you that your mailbox is full and you can't receive new emails. A business partner tries to send you an email, but due to your mailbox quota, the email server notifies you that it has been rejected. This is not only annoying: it also takes time to delete emails and their attachments one by one. Mailbox quotas and situations like these are a thing of the past with email archiving.

4) Independence

When a mail server goes offline or data is lost, every user in the company can continue to access all emails through the email archive. Companies can thus remain independent of the mail server or email service provider, which facilitates uninterrupted business operations.

5) Increased Efficiency and Productivity

With email archiving, the data volume on the mail server is always kept low. This means faster backup and recovery times as well. The result is improved performance and cleaner backups. Each user can independently restore emails with just a single mouse click. In this way, IT no longer has to go through the time-consuming process of manually restoring lost emails. Even better, a suitable email archiving solution allows users to quickly search through all archived emails and attachments, making them more productive.

6) Long-term Solution for PST Files

Damaged PST files are as scary as full mailboxes in daily operations. In this case, an IT professional can only help restore the files if PST files have been backed up. As a result, these file formats burden the IT department because of their susceptibility to errors. With the help of email archiving, PST files can be centrally archived within the company without having to change access permissions.

Backup Is Not the Same as Archiving

Yes! Email Backup Cannot Prevent Data Loss.

The terms archiving and backup are often mistakenly used interchangeably. Therefore, it is usually assumed that backup alone is sufficient in most cases. However, backing up your email server in no way replaces a proper email archive. Backup can only back up data for a limited time and restore it if needed. At the same time, compliance requirements are not taken into account, and the continuous availability and restorability of highly important emails are not ensured. Within the scope of backup, emails can be deleted immediately after being received, and therefore security can be bypassed. According to this, backup does not help meet compliance requirements and cannot prevent data loss. Backup is very important and the right thing to do, but a backup cannot replace the functions of archiving. And remember: an email archive should also be part of your backup plan!

Standard in Email Archiving: MailStore Server

One of the leading solutions in the world for email archiving.

Small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from all the advantages of modern and secure email archiving with MailStore Server. In addition, MailStore Server offers many file attachment types that allow users to quickly perform full-text searches via email and retrieve their emails from the archive using an Outlook add-in or Web Access. Users can also maintain normal folder structures and run their archives as intuitively as possible.

Source: Is Email Archiving the same as Email Backup? (mailstore.com)