Hello Paul,
To start with the Free Version will support Message Archiving if needed. The Message archiver stores the emails in plain text format ( eml ).
Message Archiving
This feature is only available in SmarterMail Enterprise edition.
Message archiving is a method of storing all email traffic for a domain -- either incoming messages, outgoing messages or both -- in a separate location on the mail server. Typically, this is a feature used for companies that need mail servers in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 or other regulatory compliance.
By default, SmarterMail does not archive any messages. To specify which domains on the SmarterMail are archived, the system administrator will need to create archiving rules. Note: If the system administrator wants to allow individual domain administrators to search their domain's message archive then individual rules need to be set up for each domain. Setting the message archiving rules to "all domains" means only the system admin will be able to access message archive and search for messages on the mail server.
When archiving is set up, messages are automatically archived as soon as they hit the spool and before they are handled by any spam and/or content filters. This means that all messages are archived, not simply those that are delivered to a user's mailbox. (The exception to this rule is messages rejected due to SMTP Blocking. If a message is rejected due SMTP Spam blocking, it will never hit the spool and, therefore, will not be archived.) On a nightly basis, SmarterMail zips up archived messages and stores them to conserve disk space on the mail server. However, zipped messages are still searchable.
If needed you can zip up any of the emails ( after doing a search, or if they have their own archive location ) and send them over to them to do with as they wish.
Please let me know if you have more questions.
Thank you
Tony Scholz
System/Network Administrator
SmarterTools Inc.
www.smartertools.com