Email Archival Solutions

Introduction

Email is competing with fax as the preferred means of electronically transmitting information. Email is quicker than a letter – most emails only take a few seconds to arrive; its has an edge over fax since it arrives in electronic form that can be edited; is better than a phone call because it doesn’t interrupt the person receiving it, and is written down so you don’t need to make a separate note; and last but not least you have a useful written record of what you sent and the exact date and time you sent it which is useful if there is a dispute later.

But that is where the plus ends and the minuses take over.

The Problem

One of those problems organizations using email for official communication face is the inability to keep a dependable record of all incoming and outgoing email traffic; the total absence of control over accidental or deliberate and unauthorized deletions.

Why Archive Emails

Email usage policy enforcement: To facilitate searching for particular words in archived email that betrays non-compliance with organizational acceptable use policy

Recovery of deleted email: To ensure that even deleted emails can be restored to a user’s inbox In its original format unlike email deleted from free email service provider servers

Surveillance/Monitoring of employee email: To grant departmental heads. Viewing rights to all email relating to a specific Active Directory Group, such as, granting the Sales Manager the right to view all emails sent or received by staff of the Sales Department

Dispute resolution: To easily track email conversations with a view all emails sent or received by staff of the sales department

Ease of Backup/Restore: To store email on a standard SQL database making it easier to backup and restore

Efficiency of Storage: To store emails more efficiently than in PST files, increase the performance of your Exchange Server, eliminate the problem of corrupted PST files and the lengthy process of ‘fixing’ them, overcome the risk of PST loss in the case of hardware failure on employee workstations, free yourself from complex backup plans to copy PST flies from each employee workstations (studies have shown that it can significantly reduce storage requirements for email by up to 80%)

Regulatory Compliance: To comply with regulations on email archiving such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC and Advanced fee Fraud Act and Other Related Offences Act and the soon to be enacted Cybercrime Act

Access to email from anywhere : To enable employees use their browser to easily locate and access all their emails from anywhere in the world

Restoration of lost email: To allow end-users to quickly restore emails back to their mailbox through a OneClick restore process, avoiding the cumbersome process of retrieving an email from a backup tape or disk, saving the network administrators time

GFI MailArchiver provides a solution

GFI MailArchiver for Exchange/SMTP provides easy-to-use corporate email archiving, enabling you to archive all internal and external mail into one or multiple SQL databases, heavily reducing reliance on PST files. This allows you to provide users with easy, centralized access to past emails via a web-based search interface and the ability to quickly restore emails through a OneClick Restore process. GFI MailArchiver also aids you to easily fulfill regulatory email storage requirements (such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). GFI MailArchiver for Exchange leverages the journaling feature of Exchange Server 2000/2003 and therefore provides unparalleled scalability and reliability at a competitive cost. Exchange Server journals all mail to a particular mailbox, after which GFI MailArchiver retrieves the mail, compresses the attachments and archives them to Microsoft SQL Server. GFI MailArchiver can also centralize email archival to one physical location by polling emails from multiple locations. For example, an office that operates in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt may want to archive email of all offices centrally in one location – Lagos.

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