GFI White Paper: Why Organizations Need To Archive Email

An email archiving solution addresses the need to retain a copy of all incoming and outgoing email traffic. With a proper email archiving solution it is possible to access email content at any time from a centrally managed location.

Email archiving is the key to the following three needs:

• Manage email server resources efficiently
• Allow virtually unlimited mailbox storage
• Meet legal requirements, compliance and business needs

The task of managing email is usually split between the system administrators and the end users. System administrators need small mailboxes which contain a limited number of email messages. Mailboxes with large attachments or a large number of email accounts can easily bring down an Exchange or email server. When a server is handling hundreds or thousands of email addresses, system administrators typically put a quota on each mailbox to limit the amount of information stored on server.

On the other hand, setting a hard quota on all mailboxes affects end users in a negative way. They often need to retrieve emails that are weeks, months or even years old. They sometimes need to be able to store emails with large documents. For example, some departments will make extensive use of PDF files for legal reasons or Microsoft Word documents. The file transfer medium of choice for these files is generally email. Additionally, these files need to be retained for a given period of time especially in the case of legal documents or in industries which require email to be retained for a minimum time frame.