Journaling and Mailbox Archiving - What You Need to Know

Journaling and Email Box Archiving – What You Need to Know

Full email inboxes, slow email servers, and missing important emails: these are just a few of the issues that can be solved with a modern email archive. It's no surprise, then, that email archiving has long been an important component of information management and an essential part of a successful company's IT strategy. However, before implementing an email archiving software, you need to know which archiving strategy best suits your company's needs.

In this article, we'll discuss various strategic approaches to email archiving, look at the differences between journaling and email box archiving, and explain the corporate goals that each strategy can achieve.

Overview: Different Email Archiving Strategies

Professional email archiving software allows businesses to choose between email box archiving and journaling, or even combine both methods.

• With email box archiving, all emails in users' mailboxes or shared mailboxes (e.g., sales@samplecompany.com) are archived at regular intervals. This can be done by directly accessing the email server centrally or by archiving local email clients.
• With Journaling (also known as daily archiving), all emails are copied to an archiving system as soon as they arrive at the email server, before they appear in the user's mailbox. This applies to outgoing emails as well.
• A company may also choose to run both methods together to benefit from specific aspects of each.

To put it clearly, journaling and daily archiving are two different processes. However, since they are related in terms of archiving technology, they are often used synonymously. In the context of MailStore, journaling initially copies emails to a mailbox that is highly accessible - "journal". Subsequently, a daily archiving process transfers the emails from the journal to the archive.

What Is Email Box Archiving?

With email box archiving, all emails are periodically extracted from users' mailboxes and copied to a central archive. Emails stored on local systems (e.g., PST files stored on a user's desktop) can also be transferred to the central archive. Furthermore, users can continue working in their usual email environment since folder structures created by users in their mailboxes can be synchronized with the archive.

A major advantage of email box archiving is that it allows specific rules to be defined for deleting emails from the mailbox after they have been archived. In the long run, this helps reduce the load on the email server, decrease storage requirements, and resolve issues related to mailbox quotas. However, users can continue accessing the emails through the archive even after they have been deleted from the server.

However, this method of archiving all user mailboxes does not guarantee an intact, tamper-proof archive. A user can continue deleting or modifying emails between archiving cycles. Similarly, external factors such as cyber attacks may cause emails to be lost before they are archived.

What Is Journaling (Daily Archiving)?

If your archiving solution needs to primarily address legal security and compliance issues, journaling is the right choice. With this method, all incoming and outgoing email traffic is archived before it appears in the user's mailbox. You can be sure that your emails are stored in a complete, original, tamper-proof, and permanently usable format. This is a practical tool for companies to meet the relevant legal requirements depending on the country and industry sector they are in.

In addition, having a complete email archive can play an important role in making emails usable as evidence in legal cases.

A potential disadvantage of journaling is that this method does not support defining rules to automatically delete emails from the mailbox, so the load on the email server is not reduced. All emails archived from the daily mailbox remain in the user mailboxes.

Additionally, journaling does not allow existing folder structures in the user mailbox to be synchronized with the archive. Emails can only be assigned to users as received or sent items in the archive, and all access rights are fully preserved. However, a comprehensive search function can correct this situation and become an important technical basis for auditors in the "e-Discovery" scenarios that need to be searched across all corporate archiving systems.

Important: Private Emails

Please remember that not all emails can be archived. Data privacy guidelines should be considered. For example, in some countries, the use of business email services for private purposes may be problematic. In such cases, a recommended solution would be to prohibit the use of private emails (e.g., via a contract) or ensure that external email services are used only for private email correspondence. Therefore, you should always pay attention to data privacy guidelines.

Can the Two Methods Be Combined?

Since both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, some companies choose to combine email box archiving with journaling.

Use Case 1: A journal archiving solution is distributed to prevent data loss and ensure emails are archived in a legally compliant manner. Email box archiving is also used to ensure that personal archives have the same folder structure as in the email client, allowing users to work in a familiar environment in the archive. Defined deletion rules for email box archiving allow archived emails to be deleted from users' mailboxes, thus preventing issues with mailbox quotas. The email server is emptied, and storage requirements are reduced. Depending on the archiving solution used and the condition that the archiving software can consolidate emails internally, this combination of archiving methods only marginally requires more storage space.

Use Case 2: With the introduction of an email archiving solution, the email box archiving method is initially used to extract all existing emails from mailboxes and transfer them to a central archive, including local emails (e.g., PST files stored on a user's desktop). Subsequently, it is used to delete emails from mailboxes and non-central storage locations if needed. Afterwards, all future emails are archived using the journaling method.

Conclusion

Journaling and email box archiving represent two distinct strategic approaches to email archiving, each pursuing different goals.

Journaling Email Box Archiving

Complete and automatic archiving of all incoming and outgoing emails Yes No

Legally compliant archiving Yes No

Archiving existing emails (emails stored in mailboxes or any other non-central location) No Yes

Folder structure synchronized with archive No Yes

Option to delete archived emails from user mailboxes No Yes

Elimination of mailbox quotas No Yes

Email server is emptied No Yes

Reduction in storage requirements No Yes

While email box archiving primarily focuses on reducing storage requirements and allowing users to work in a familiar environment within the archive, journaling is generally a strategic email archiving approach driven by the need to comply with legal requirements and precautions. By instantly archiving all incoming and outgoing emails, your company ensures that electronic correspondence is stored in a complete, original, tamper-proof, and permanently usable format, while eliminating the possibility of users modifying or deleting emails before archiving.

Both methods can be used together and, depending on the chosen email archiving solution, this additional cost is not incurred. Professional archiving software should be able to seamlessly combine these two strategic options.

If you want more information about our MailStore Server solution, please take a look at our products page or watch our product video.

For detailed information on how to set up a journaling or email box archiving application based on MailStore Server, please refer to our detailed help article.

FAQ

What Are the Advantages of Email Box Archiving?

• Folder structures created by users in their mailboxes are fully synchronized with the archive, allowing users to continue working in their familiar email environment
• Emails are deleted from the mailbox after being archived, thereby emptying the email server and making mailbox quotas observable
• Storage requirements can be reduced
• Existing emails (e.g., old emails in mailboxes or PST files) can also be archived

What Are the Advantages of Journaling (Daily Archiving)?

• Emails are seamlessly archived as soon as they reach the email server or leave it, ensuring compliance with relevant laws for a company
• This direct archiving method also prevents emails from being lost or manipulated

What Is the Best Email Archiving Strategy for Legal Compliance?

Journaling allows emails to be archived before they are delivered to the mailbox. This prevents data loss or manipulation, creating a seamless, faithful email archive that is an essential component of any legally compliant email archiving system.

What Is the Best Email Archiving Strategy for Reducing Storage Requirements?

Email box archiving allows previously archived emails to be permanently deleted from mailboxes. This can reduce the storage requirements for email boxes in the company. Emails that have been deleted from mailboxes can be accessed directly from the archive if needed.

What Email Archiving Strategy Helps Reduce the Load on the Email Server?

Email box archiving can reduce the storage requirements for email boxes in the company if emails that have already been archived are permanently deleted from these mailboxes. As a result, lower storage requirements help to clear out the email server.

What Is the Best Email Archiving Strategy for Archiving Old Emails?

Email box archiving allows even old emails to be copied from mailboxes to the archive. Likewise, email box archiving can also transfer emails stored on a non-central basis (e.g., PST files) to the archive.

Source: Journaling vs. Mailbox Archiving – What You Need to Know (mailstore.com)