How to archive your emails

Email archiving means moving emails out of your main message store and into separate storage as they get older and accessed less frequently. We will discuss when and why to consider email archiving, the best ways of going about the task and the tools available to manage it.

Why archive?
One of the prime reasons for archiving is regulatory compliance, although what is required to stay legal if you’re a small company is unclear. For example, there’s no requirement to keep every email message sent or received ­ at least, not yet. But the Data Protection Act (DPA) requires that any personal information held on individuals, including emails in some circumstances, be available for inspection if requested, which is hard to do without an archiving solution.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act, similarly, has implications for email archiving. Some industries are also subject to regulations that are explicit when it comes to what needs to be retained and for how long. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) for example, requires the companies it regulates, to store emails for up to six years, or indefinitely in some instances.

Whether you think you need to comply with such regulations is down to you to find out. However, it also makes sense to keep copies of your email communications to prevent litigation.

For example, to prove who said what, and when, in employment tribunals, or to show that proper procedures were followed in these and other legal cases. The fact that you have taken the time and trouble to implement an archiving system can also count in your favour, especially if the other side is relying on hearsay and memory.

Simpler management
Archiving is not just for legal protection. It also makes email management easier both at the personal and company level.

It is easier to work with a small inbox, safe in the knowledge that you can find archived information if needed, rather than try and keep everything in one location. At the company level it means storage resources can be reserved for the most active data with no need to keep archives on the most expensive storage area network (San) disks or back up archived messages as often as live message stores.

Lastly, archiving can enhance the performance and reliability of your email system. This benefit comes from reducing the amount of data that mail servers have to keep track of, without the need for limits on mailbox size ­ which is the usual approach taken to solve such problems.

The wherefores of archiving
Archiving is quite different from a backup. With a backup you’re unlikely to need regular access to the stored data, whereas documents may need to be retrieved from archives on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter if that retrieval takes a while, but it shouldn’t be too slow and it’s best if the archives can be made accessible to end users directly, through their usual email client or web browser, rather than having to be specially retrieved by IT support staff.

Flexible search facilities are another feature worth having, to eliminate the need to selectively categorise messages and their attachments up front.

Archiving can be done manually, but it’s unsatisfactory as users will have to remember what to archive and how. It can also be performed and automated at the client end (see Archiving with Outlook on the next page) but, again, it’s not an ideal solution, especially on large networks where client-side archiving is very hard to manage.

The best approach is for archiving to be done either at the mail server or at a gateway through which all incoming and outgoing messages are handled. This can be achieved in several ways. One of the most common is to install and run extra archiving software on the email server. Another is to install a separate archiving server either using the software hosted on an industry-standard Windows or Linux platform or via a specialist hardware appliance.

Unfortunately, users can still mess things up by storing messages locally using commercial mail servers as well as the company system. In this case a lot of the products can also locate and archive information held in local Outlook Personal Folders (.pst files), with central discovery and management to help automate and streamline the process.

Finally, archiving can be done using a hosted service, where the hardware and software required are run in the cloud, with archives held remotely or on your network.