Our mail archives offer you many advantages

• automatic integration into our managed servers
• audit-proof storage
• DSGVO compliant
• encrypted and compressed storage of mails
• comfortable interface to find archived mails
• restore or export deleted mails
• individual retention rules

E-mail archiving – why actually?

Email is one of the basic elements of the Internet and is the predominant form of business communication, including customer contacts and also required, for example, for logging into almost all online services.

The constantly growing volume of emails can affect the performance of mail servers. Simply deleting them is hardly an option, as important data can be lost.

Outsourcing email from production mail servers not only greatly improves their performance, but also reduces the amount of storage space required. A good email archive uses both compression and intelligent deduplication (also called single-instance storage) to save 50% or more storage space.

 

Differences between email archiving and backups

An email backup – or any other backup – is a snapshot of your data at a particular point in time. Let’s say the data is backed up daily. In the event of a hardware failure or data corruption, up to a day’s worth of email can be lost. However, most of the data is safely stored in backups.

So while data backup is done at regular intervals, email archiving is a real-time process. Our mail servers are configured to forward a copy of every email received to the archive. So as long as the archive is in operation, no e-mails are lost even if the mail server fails.

The email archive not only captures the emails, but also indexes them and makes them searchable. In contrast, an email backup is neither indexed nor searchable.

Normally, a certain number of e-mail backups, e.g. 10, is kept. This means that the state of an email inbox longer than, say, 10 days ago cannot be restored. But what if a user accidentally deletes an important email today? It will have disappeared from backups 10 days later. This is unacceptable in a regulated industry where you need to be able to produce all relevant emails based on retention policies. Our email archives provide long-term email storage and solve these problems.

An email backup plays a role in disaster recovery, while an email archive meets your compliance and regulatory requirements.

 

How does the e-mail archiving work?

Our email archive is the solution to this problem. Our mail servers are configured to forward a copy of all incoming, outgoing and even internal emails to the archive. No end-user activity is required, it’s completely automatic. Archiving can be controlled per domain (e.g. example.com) or per mailbox (e.g. info@meinedomain.de).

While the email archive allows end users to search, view, download, and restore their own email, it prevents them from deleting email from the email archive.

Users can also restore emails from the archive to their inbox with a single click, eliminating the need for time-consuming restoration of data from a backup.

Productivity

Searching for a specific email in a huge mailbox can be tedious and slow. Our email archives are designed to deliver fast search results even when there are millions of emails. It allows you to perform a detailed search based on sender or recipient addresses, dates, words, phrases in the email body and attachments.

Avoid problems with the trash

Deleting messages is an important feature of all email applications. It allows you to get rid of unwanted emails. Unwanted emails are messages that for some reason you don’t want to be in your inbox anymore. In fact, unwanted is a broad term. It can be a spam mail that somehow got through the spam filter, a joke email from colleagues, something unimportant from a family member, etc.

When an email is deleted, it is usually not removed from the mailbox, but only moved to the Trash. This folder is intended for deleted emails. However, the trashfolder keeps the deleted emails only for a certain period of time, e.g. 30 days or depending on the mail server settings. After this period, the deleted emails are removed permanently.

30 days is enough, isn’t it? On the one hand, the trash gives the assurance that an important email that was accidentally deleted can be easily restored to the inbox.

On the other hand, the legal department, human resources, compliance department and IT department might have a heart attack when they discover that an email is accidentally deleted and lost forever, which could be critical to a future litigation or e-discovery request. This can have consequences for the company, with the threat of fines, etc.

The end user may be happy with the recycle bin, but it’s not a sufficient solution for the enterprise. We need something better.

Security

Our email archives provide tamper-proof storage of email.

Compliance with regulations

Many companies work in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, finance, and energy, where they need to retain email for a certain period of time. An email archive helps with compliance with regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, GoBD, etc.

Prevent data loss

Users can delete important emails either accidentally or maliciously. Some users delete all their emails when they leave the company, which means the company risks losing important data. With an archiving solution, you don’t have to rely on users to adhere to email retention policies. All emails are automatically saved, archived and retained.

Audit records

Our email archives store detailed audit trails that show who did what and when in the archive.

Integrity control of e-mails

Emails are often used as evidence. Therefore, it is important that organizations can prove that the archived emails are stored in their original format and have not been modified since. To verify this, we need to perform an integrity check every time the archived message is retrieved.

When the archive receives a message, it calculates a cryptographic hash value of the message and stores it as metadata associated with the original message. When the message is retrieved from the archive, it recomputes the hash value and compares the new hash value with the stored hash value. If they match, this is confirmation that the message in question has not been compromised or tampered with in any way.

Our mail archives give a visual indication of the result of the comparison, so that it is obvious to the user whether the message is intact or not. If not, the archived file has probably been corrupted or modified in some way. For this purpose, a hash value is used and the entire message (as well as headers and attachments) is included in the calculation process.

Integrity checking is only part of the archive’s security. Any well-equipped email archive uses timestamps and comprehensive logging to record who did what and when. Such an audit trail can be searched to quickly find the details of a particular transaction, such as who viewed a particular message in the archive.

Another important feature is user roles and permissions, which allow fine-grained access to messages and archiving functions. Normal users can perform actions on their own emails other than modifying or deleting them, such as adding notes or tags. HR and legal teams typically have greater rights in terms of message scope. They can view others’ emails, search audit records, etc.

Encryption of messages is another layer of defense. If someone could somehow copy the archived emails to a USB drive, for example, by gaining access to the backups, they might just get a bunch of encrypted files that are useless without the encryption key.

Setting up and using a mail archive

How to set up a mail archive is described in Mail archive setup.

In Use mail archive we explain how to archive single emails or complete email domains.