Message Archiving in SmarterMail

Archiving is a method of storing messaging traffic for a domain – either incoming messages, outgoing messages or both -- in a secondary location, either on the mail server or on a separate storage location. Generally, archiving is used by a company for compliance reasons, such as HIPAA, FINRA or Sarbanes Oxley.

While there are many archiving solutions available from vendors such as MailStore and Barracuda, they may not be the most ideal solutions. Not only do they incur additional costs for a company, they may not be able to capture and store the information necessary to meet compliance regulations. In addition, they require additional setup, additional management and permissions, and more. 

Thankfully, SmarterMail Enterprise includes a complete archiving solution for both email messages as well as Group Chat and provides this at no additional charge.  Below is a brief list of the advantages of using SmarterMail’s included archiving feature.

Archiving can be set up so that all messages for all domains are archived. It’s also possible to set up archiving rules for individual domains. This latter set up means that domain administrators have the ability to search a domain’s archived messages. In the case where all domains are archived, and there aren’t rules set up for individual domains, only the system administrator has the ability to search archived messages.

Incoming and outgoing messages are archived as they hit the Spool, before any antispam rules are put into effect and before any content filters are applied. That means that all messages are captured and kept in their original state, free from any interaction with the mail server or interference from users.

SmarterMail’s archiving includes keeping copies of all Group Chats. If a domain uses SmarterMail’s Group Chat for its users, then not only are their emails archived, their chats are as well. This is truly important for industries that have strict compliance regulations where all communications need to be kept for a set number of years.

Based on the needs of the company, Archiving can be set to capture email coming into the server, leaving the server or both. This can even be set up separately for each domain, if domain-level archiving rules are set up. This gives system administrators and business owners a great deal of flexibility.

A key component of any archiving solution is the ability to search the archives. SmarterMail’s Archiving feature gives administrators the ability to search for words and/or phrases based on who the messages are sent To or sent From as well as start and end dates. Archives are kept forever and aren’t part of any custom auto-clean rules that are set up within SmarterMail, and Group Chat archives can’t be deleted.

While many companies choose to archive messages on the same server as their users’ mailboxes, it’s possible to set up archiving so that the archive is kept completely separate: on a UNC drive or even NAS storage set up as a mapped drive. In cases where individual archiving rules are set up by domain, each domain can have its archive stored in its own location.

If a domain is set up with its own archiving rules, any domain administrator for that domain has access to the archive and can search it. This relieves some of the day-to-day administrative duties for the system administrator, freeing them up to take care of server-wide issues while company, or domain, level duties are handled by the domain administrator.

Once a search is completed, and the messages found, they can either be downloaded or copied to a mailbox. Downloaded messages are zipped and each individual .EML file is inside the zip. Messages that are restored can be restored to any mailbox, and to any folder within that mailbox.

Message Archiving is a powerful tool for any company or business. With its inclusion in SmarterMail Enterprise, companies have an extremely useful tool at their fingertips without having to incur any additional costs.