The Concept Of Online Email Archiving

An email archive preserves all emails for the purpose of operational needs as well as for compliance reasons. Its function is to automatically extract the contents of a message and attachment from both incoming as well as outgoing emails and after the process of indexing; an online email archive stores them securely in a read-only format. This way, the archived records can be safely stored and maintained in their original state. The purpose of email archiving is also to reduce the number of online emails on the mail server, thereby decreasing the demand for storage space. As compared to other email storage methods, email archives are found to take up less physical storage space.

One of the major advantages of using an email archiving solution is that the company gets a centralized and truly accessible copy of all their mails which protects them in scenarios like intentional or accidental deletion of emails by end users. There is also no need to search for personal archives present on each of your local machine, when a litigation support claim occurs. The benefit of email archiving system is that they have extremely advanced and technologically superior search and retrieval functions which allow its users to trace all their email messages in a cost effective and fast manner. They also allow authorized administrators to setup restricted access in order to safeguard the intellectual property rights, data integrity, security and confidentiality of the data with respect to the statutes. ‘The traditional ‘Backup’ facility only serves to save the existing data in the event of any problems, whereas an email archive is able to protect the data effectively, so that it can be easily accessed when needed. Tracing an email record, without having an effective email archiving system in place can be a very expensive and difficult.

Nowadays, it is mandatory for most of the IT departments to use email archiving and manage the entire company’s mails efficiently, so that specific messages can be easily traced when required, in a matter of minutes. This falls under compliance legislation and legal discovery rules of a company. E-mail archiving software applications are available which adhere to the company policies and allow IT managers to free up space available on production servers, manage large email archives, and also speed up the time needed for back up. These software applications come with abilities for indexing and searching, provision for accessing logs if an email is subpoenaed and act as a life-cycle management component which controls the flow of all emails coming in to the company. The administrator has the power to set up rules for these life-cycle management components. Its function is classification of email messages in need of archiving, migrating relevant messages to an economical and effective media of storage and automatic deletion of junk or unnecessary mails.

Overall, an efficient online email archiving system saves and protects data contained in emails, to provide quick accession to those mails later on. Previously, end-users had to maintain individual email archives and the IT department would back them up. But it was extremely difficult to search for messages from the bulk. With the advent of email archiving system, this problem has been solved.

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