Archiving

The term archive is ambigious at best when discussed between legal and IT professionals. There are a number of variations and definitions of email archiving and/or exporting.

Do you archive email?

While a simple question, the moving-target answer depends upon a company’s policies, procedures and technology. Formally, email archiving employs a systematic method of retaining and protecting information contained in email messages and their attachments, for retention and possible retrieval at some future date.

Companies often defer to an employee’s judgment and actions in maintaining their own -- in reality -- the company’s email archives (email client archiving discussed later). Compliance legislation (SOX, HIPPA, etc.) and legal Discovery rules mandate companies pro-actively manage email retention, which is producing assorted archiving solutions with various features:

• Indexing and search capabilities 
• Access logs providing a "virtual paper trail" 
• Rule-based classification identifying messages to be archived 
• Migrate messages to economical and efficient storage media 
• Legal Hold capabilities 
• Identify and collect responsive email
• Automatic message destruction based on retention requirements and policies

There are a significant number of email archiving products and services available on today's market. Two common email archiving approaches are live-capture and email/attachment replacement.

Live Capture

Live Capture solutions are inserted between the mail server and the Internet. The system captures incoming and outgoing email, creating a copy on the archive server, then releasing the message to its intended destination and recipient. Capture methodologies either capture every email, or acting as a traffic cop, copy only those emails identified by an organization’s rules and policies, i.e. specific individual’s, company’s, words or phrases.

Email/Attachment Replacement

Initially intended to combat mail server storage limitations, replacement solutions integrate with existing email systems; extracting email and attachments (based on retention policies) and are replaced with a "pointer." Emails and attachments are moved and stored on a separate archive server; freeing-up space on mail servers and reducing backup times. The individual does not notice any difference, when accessing their email account the "pointer appears just as any other email, and when opened retrieves the item from the archive server. A number of archive products are incorporating policy-based email archiving features, extending the mail server’s capabilities, providing retention and destruction management of the emails and attachments.