Archiving email and documents for small businesses

Long-Term Storage

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Harald Zisler

You can easily archive email and attachments, thereby saving overhead and money. This article shows various approaches that use built-in tools on Linux and FreeBSD.

In many countries, business owners are required by law to archive email and electronic documents containing business content (see "Private Email Use in the Enterprise"). But even without legal constraints, orderly archiving of email and electronic documents can help reconstruct the facts of a business process without too much trouble, even years later.

Private Email Use in the Enterprise

In some countries, civil laws often contradict the laws on privacy of correspondence, which applies to private email by staff and staff representatives. One approach that works for all parties involved is to introduce a company policy to prevent private email use in the local mail client. As an alternative, the employer expressly allows staff to access their private mail via a web mailer. This nicely separates private and company information and the staff find a legitimate option for accessing their private mail at the workplace.

File Format Requirements

Email often contains attachments created with various office applications, which can cause problems with long-term storage. The file formats these programs use are constantly changing.

The information must be stored in a format that will remain readable for a long time. Storing in plaintext format offers the biggest benefits. Text files are easy to search, to store in databases, and to convert to a different character set. The use of Rich Text Format (RTF) as a storage format for office documents helps keep (most) of the formatting and offers the benefits of a plaintext file. In Open/LibreOffice, you can go to Tools | Options | Load/Save | General and select Rich Text Format as the default format in the Always save as field (

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