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Techniques for archiving email

Store and Find

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By Jörg Fritsch

Email archiving involves more than just backing up your email directories. It is also a question of classifying the email and making it easier for users to find their way around overfilled email folders.

In the past few years, very few technology developments have been as versatile and necessary as email archiving. In fact, it ranks high on the best practices list of many corporations. Many administrators who hear the term "email archiving" for the first time think about data privacy and automatically file the term away in the category of backup. However, email archiving makes sense outside the scope of backup, if you think of it in terms of email management.

Document Lifecycle Management and Compliance

For decades, corporations have developed their filing systems into something approaching an art form; thus, they can protect records and retain them for a defined period of time. To cope with these mountains of paper, many policies have been introduced to define how long to retain certain document types before they finally end up in the shredder. Little is left to common sense: In the paper world, everything is strictly organized.

Email management applies these policies and processes to email, thus ensuring harmonized document lifecycle management. Although it is not a question of keeping meaningless messages indefinitely, although some storage vendors might recommend doing so, you can't just adopt quotas and a policy of benign neglect. Just like physical filing, email management requires a policy that, ideally, defines which email the system should keep (and for how long) and which it should delete beyond any possibility of recovery.

Not many corporations have actually achieved this ideal state. Because of a lack of email classification tools, most businesses are unable to distinguish between Internet email (i.e., email that reached the company across the Internet) and internal email and between business and private correspondence. Currently, only two classes typically exist: spam and non-spam. Administrators who want to try out more granular classifications or experience

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