How to archive your emails

Archiving tools
The market for specialist email archiving products has grown hugely in the past few years, largely fuelled by a lack (perceived or otherwise) of such facilities in the leading email applications such as Exchange, Groupwise and Lotus Notes.

As a result, there is a lot of choice, which is good, but implementing a good archiving system isn’t any easier. So here’s what to look for, together with a few names and links to get you started.

If you have opted for hosted email your first port of call should be your service provider, many of which now offer archiving as an add-on for an extra charge.

If the provider doesn’t offer archiving you may be able to add it yourself, typically in the form of another hosted service such as Message Labs, now a part of Symantec.

However, the best advice is to look for an alternative service able to provide email and archiving together.

When it comes to archiving messages held on an in-house mail server, most of the products are written for Exchange, although there are some that can be used with Groupwise or Notes and a few that will work with any SMTP solution.

Among the Exchange-specific products is Archive One from C2C, and GFI Mailarchiver which can also help manage personal folder message stores on individual client PCs. The GFI product can also be used with other mail servers and there are lots more besides which, like Mailarchiver, are designed specifically for deployment by small businesses.

Indeed, most of the leading small-business mail servers have archiving facilities. Kerio Mail Server, for example, has it built in, while if you’re running MDaemon there’s a specialist add-on ­ unimaginatively called Archive Server for MDaemon, available from a partner called Achab.

There are also plenty of products to use with other Windows or Linux mail servers, including Mail Marshal where archiving is implemented along with other security tools and the Barracuda Message Archiver, a device that is simple to deploy and manage.

There are also plenty of other companies and products we haven’t mentioned, so researching the market is important. Seek advice from your email provider, talk to other specialists and try to find out what other, similar businesses, are using, before you decide what to buy.

Archiving with Outlook
For foolproof archiving you need tools that operate at the server level ­ where mail enters and leaves the organisation. However, if you don’t have or can’t afford such tools there are still things you can do at the client end.

Outlook, for example, has archiving facilities built in as standard which can be used to store messages offline whether you’re a single self-employed user with a hosted email account or a corporate employee connecting to the company Exchange server from home.

There’s nothing magical or mysterious about Outlook archiving. It works by simply moving messages, attachments, calendars and so on from the active message store into one or more Personal Folders files ­ referred to as .pst files. These are typically held on the local hard disk and can still be accessed from Outlook, but are separate to the main inbox and other folders used to by the email client.

Outlook archiving can be done manually, for example in Outlook 2007, you simply go to the File menu and select Archive ­ but it is better automated through the aptly named Autoarchive tool. This can be scheduled to run at preset intervals to move items older than a certain age to a specific Personal Folders file. There are facilities to configure this for Outlook as a whole and individual folders, if required.

On the downside Outlook archiving can get quite complicated and some users may not want to bother. In which case it’s also possible to enforce its use and set common retention policies across an organisation using Active Directory Group Policy and other management tools.