There has always been a battle between IT and users about keeping email forever. Small Email Boxes keep the Email Servers healthy and fast and avoid disk crunches and backup problems. Users want information available forever. IT believes that the content of an email should go to a database that is available to others who need the information, and can be stored with other information that is pertinent to the email. However, laws in the United States, have finally given many users a legal reason to keep email forever. Ok. Five years really is not forever, but many people are fighting compliance issues, and many of the current mail systems are not really setup to support this in a meaningful way. I mean do we really need to keep all of the email that comes from unsolicited email from all over the world? That said. Here is the direction that mail archiving seems to fall into.
- Manual Archiving.
- Redirecting all email to an archival mailbox on the server.
- Redirecting all email through an archival system (hosted or not).
Each of these options has different advantages and disadvantages for your small business.
Manual Archiving does not meet Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA or GLBA requirements. Manual Archival creates a problem finding and managing the size of the email and provides users with more to do and backup problems, galore.
Redirecting all email to an archival mailbox on the server lacks the sophistication more info
of providing your users with a place to find the email you convince them to delete from their own Email Box, and needs to be managed for size like other files on the server. This also does not provide a level of protection from the prying eyes of unscrupulous Systems Administrators. Everything is in one place and a time based archive of the items can be performed using exmerge.
Running through an archival system has many advantages over both Manual Archiving and simply placing everything in one folder. There are many solutions for this both hosted and on-premise. I have been very impressed with MailArchiva.com as a very low cost solution to provide mail archival that provides compliance and quite a few other nice to haves:
Allow users to view email.
Store Data Encrypted.
Search, even inside attachments.
A fancy web-based interface.
Does not require a database.
Indexes the mail for rapid retrieval.
Auditing.
Spans Multiple Disks.
Handles email from multiple systems.
There is support for Exchange, IpSwitch, PostFix, Sendmail, Imail and many others.
The OpenSource version does not provide complete Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. However, the Enterprise Edition will not destroy your wallet.
What other mail archival solutions have you seen that provide high support for a low cost?
How do you do archival today?
Would it make a lot more sense if there were only one email system that handled the email for the whole United States? There would be much less administration, virus difficulties, spam… Etc.
I look forward to your comments.
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