Email Archiving

Question asked by Sagar - 6/16/2026 at 9:01 PM

Unanswered

Hello,

How email archiving works for the domain which is migrating from another email to Smartermail enterprise. How can we configure Archiving for the old mailboxes

7 Replies

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Tony Scholz Replied

6/17/2026 at 12:18 PM

Employee Post

Hello Sagar,

Can you be more specific about what you are looking to do?

Remove specific users who are no longer used without deleting them?

You can "Detach User".

Detach User removes a user from the domain's active account registry while preserving all of their data (mail, folders, files, stats) on disk. The user becomes invisible to the domain and cannot log in or send/receive mail. The operation is reversible via Attach User.

Detach User: Can be found by going to 'System Admin Login -> Manage -> Domains -> Action Menu (...) -> Detach User'; from here, you will enter the email address that you wish to detach.

To re-attach a detached user:

System Admin > Manage > Domains > Actions menu on the domain > Attach User
Browse to the user's data directory or enter the username
The system reads the user's data from disk and re-adds them to the domain's accounts file

KB reference: https://portal.smartertools.com/kb/a2980/restore-a-users-account-folders-or-emails.aspx

Tony Scholz

Lead Network/System Administrator

SmarterTools Inc.

www.smartertools.com

Sagar Replied

6/18/2026 at 1:20 AM

Hi Tony,

My requirement is to archive all mailboxes for the domain which are migrated from Exchange Server to SM Enterprise.

I had enabled archive but didn't find old mailboxes in archive folder or while trying to retrieve.

Thank you

William Allen Replied

7/6/2026 at 4:30 PM

Hi all,

I am new to the SmarterMail system and trying to figure out different things on configuration. I had been with Icewarp since 2006 when is was merak mail but their system is just to cumbersome anymore. We discussed coming over to SmarterMail for a few years now but hesitated because of a few features they had that wasn't available here.

One is how Archived mail is handled. My clients really liked how they were managed. Each user had an Archive folder in the mail folder tree. Under Archive was two more folders for Inbox and Sent messages. Within those folders were Month-year folders for organization.

Icewarp also didn't put mail in the archive until after spam checks.

I would like to suggest these features be added to the SmarterMail system.

Now for Archive management.... The documentation say I can enable it for Domain Admins to allow users to see their Archives but all I see is an archive search feature, not an Archive folder with their emails? Can I add Archive folders to users email folder tree's? If so, how?

Thanks,

Bill

Kyle Kerst Replied

7/7/2026 at 7:42 AM

Employee Post

Message Archiving in SmarterMail isn't a user-side archive that retains their old email, its more a historical record of email coming in or going out of the domain that can be searched by domain and system administrators and used as a restore point should users need a message recovered. The messages in an Exchange user's archive within their account would likely need to be retrieved using our Mailbox Migration or IMAP retrieval functionality if the archive folders are freely accessible to the users on the Exchange side.

Kyle Kerst

Lead Internal Network/System Administrator

SmarterTools Inc.

smartertools.com

William Allen Replied

7/7/2026 at 10:46 AM

Thanks, I knew that, in fact our users archives did come across as a folders and their archive emails came over as well. It is now charged against their storage quota's.

I was hoping I could delegate the archive search feature to the email clients so they didn't need to bother the domain administrator to do a search for mail they wanted to recover or look for not remembering when they received it.

Most or our domain admin's are just families and small businesses that just want their own domain name for their email and aren't doing the "admin" functions of it as a full time job.

My users also loved having the ability to do this work on their own and not having to submit support requests.

If there is a way I can use the API to do this that could work. But it would be a great feature if it could be added.

Bill

Kyle Kerst Replied

7/7/2026 at 4:11 PM

Employee Post

That makes sense Bill, and if the user is a Domain Administrator and you set up the Message Archive settings at the domain level (instead of system-wide) those administrators should be able to search and recover messages from the archive as well. You can find some API methods pertaining to this as well! As an example, here is the system level call for kicking off an archive search:

https://mail.smartertools.com/Documentation/api#/reference/SmarterMail.Web.Api.SystemAdminSettingsController/BeginMessageArchiveSearch/post

Kyle Kerst

Lead Internal Network/System Administrator

SmarterTools Inc.

smartertools.com

Thomas Sangster Replied

10/12/2026 at 2:06 AM

When migrating a domain to SmarterMail Enterprise, first import the old mailboxes and their existing emails into SmarterMail. Then configure email archiving according to your retention requirements and ensure the appropriate archiving settings are enabled for the domain or users. For long-term protection, you can use Mail Backup X to back up and archive emails from supported mailboxes, helping preserve historical emails and making them easier to access when needed.

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