Best Email Archiving Software
Email archiving software compresses and stores emails older than a certain user-defined age with the aim of referencing or auditing at a later date. These solutions enable companies to keep full records of any email transactions without the need to consume significant storage. By archiving emails, companies can audit employee email conversations, sales email interaction histories, and more for a more complete view of a user or company’s conversational history. IT departments will utilize email archiving solutions to preserve email history, enabling HR teams, management, sales teams, and more to then audit archived emails and make business decisions. Email archiving tools work well with a variety of communications platforms as a method to preserve B2B, B2C, and employee interactions.
To qualify for inclusion in the Email Archiving category, a product must:
Best Email Archiving Software At A Glance
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Paubox is a HIPAA compliant email security platform designed for healthcare organizations. It provides outbound email encryption and AI-powered inbound email protection, helping organizations safeguar
Paubox is a HIPAA compliant email encryption service that allows users to send secure emails without taking extra steps. Reviewers like the ease of use, seamless integration with existing email platforms, and the peace of mind provided by the automatic encryption of both incoming and outgoing emails. Reviewers noted occasional issues with emails being held up in quarantine, difficulty understanding the technology, and concerns about the cost, especially for small practices.
16,515 Twitter followers
Mimecast Cloud Archive solution keeps multiple copies of every inbound, outbound and internal email, along with detailed meta-data and a copy of the email if it was changed by policy enforcement. Emai
18,063 Twitter followers
Dropsuite, a NinjaOne company, is an award-winning cloud software platform enabling businesses and organizations globally to easily backup, recover and protect their important business information. Dr
3,534 Twitter followers
Smarsh’s Connected Archive is inclusive of capture, Archive, supervision and e-discovery capabilities across 80+ communication channels. It delivers unparalleled efficiency for small to mid-sized orga
5,684 Twitter followers
Capture all email data accurately, easily meet regulatory requirements, and take complex discovery requests in stride. The Barracuda Message Archiver ensures secure, long-term storage, while users get
15,253 Twitter followers
Jatheon's archiving solution assists organizations to store, access, search and produce structured and unstructured historical communications data for audits, compliance and ediscovery. With Jatheon,
1,661 Twitter followers
Launched in the UK in 2003, Cryoserver has customers in 28 countries around the globe. It serves a large client base across all sectors, including financial, industrial and government. Cryoserver ema
460 Twitter followers
CyberSentriq is an integrated cybersecurity and data protection platform, leveraging solutions from two best-of breed vendors in the MSP space. Partnering with over 3,000 MSPs and protecting over 150,
Redstor Backup is a cloud-based solution that allows users to tailor their data backup and restore processes based on factors such as data type, location, or age. Users frequently mention the flexibility of the product, its ability to simplify backup and disaster recovery processes, and the security it provides by encrypting client's data and information. Reviewers experienced issues with the user interface being hard to use, the first backup taking longer on slower internet connections, and the need for more detailed reporting and proactive notifications.
1,963 Twitter followers
N-able™ Mail Assure is cloud-based email security helps you and your customers stay in control and protect inbound and outbound email using collective threat intelligence, 24/7 email continuity, and l
MailStore Server is a leading email archiving solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses . It creates 1:1 copies of all emails in a central archive, ensuring data security and availabilit
The Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service provides a complete on demand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud solution. With our guided setup wizard, most customers are typically up and running in less than
15,253 Twitter followers
Get world-class, AI-powered email security with Mimecast Email Security CG. Easily manage complex environments, customize policies to meet your needs, and get essential added protection for M365 or Go
18,063 Twitter followers
Trustifi is a cybersecurity firm featuring solutions delivered on a software-as-a-service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest-to-use and deploy email security products providing both
348 Twitter followers
Micro Focus Enterprise Messaging is a complete collaboration solution that provides your organization with email, scheduling, instant messaging, chat-based teamwork, security, archiving, backup, and d
21,592 Twitter followers
Proofpoint Essentials for Small Business is a cloud-based enterprise-class security for small and medium enterprises with email security, continuity, archiving, and social-media protection.
31,119 Twitter followers
Learn More About Email Archiving Software
What is Email Archiving Software?
Email archiving software compresses, stores, and indexes emails for future referencing or legal auditing. As emails transfer, the archive solution copies each email and stores them in an on-premise server, cloud server, or both (hybrid). Email users can delete their old emails to save space since they can retrieve old emails anytime in the email archive. Email archiving is an ongoing process, so users don’t have to worry about data loss at any point.
From an organization's perspective, they can keep full records of any email transactions without consuming significant storage. Even though emails are compressed, companies and legal entities can still search, index, and audit employee email conversations, sales email interaction histories, and conversational histories. Stored emails are usually read-only, and their access is monitored and logged by administrators. This prevents unauthorized access and protects the integrity of the email history. Email archiving is not only beneficial to individual users, but also to companies that need to be compliant with regulations. Financial services companies, healthcare organizations, legal firms, and other regulated organizations are legally required to keep copies of their email. Regardless of which industries the user works with, email archiving is important and beneficial to everyone.
What Types of Email Archiving Software Exist?
On-premise email archiving
On-premise email archiving software stores all the emails in physical servers on the premises of the organization. Started in the 2000s, this type of solution has been very reliable and can be fully customized to different needs. However, it requires a high initial investment to build up the servers and the IT team to manage it.
Cloud email archiving
Cloud email archiving software stores all the emails in a remote physical server managed by a third-party vendor. It is charged based on a subscription so it doesn’t require initial investments and maintenance. Reputable vendors offer reliable, inexpensive, and easy management archiving services that are compliant with legal requirements. However, migration to the cloud is still a big hurdle.
Hybrid email archiving
The hybrid solution enables email archiving on-premises and on the cloud. It is a solution for businesses that are in the migration process or don’t want to commit to a full cloud solution.
What are the Features of Email Archiving Software?
The following are some core features within email archiving software that can help users manage their email retention and e-discovery policy:
Email journaling: Every email, calendar, and event transaction must be copied and stored in the archive server in real time. Archived emails should never be replaced or modified for their integrity. This is necessary to keep in compliance with any legal requirements because the information stored must be 100% true to its original source.
Email compression: All copied emails are compressed to save space on the archives. This saves server space and money.
Email retrieval: Email account owners and administrators should be able to retrieve all of their emails within the retention period. This also means the email archive server should have a high availability so that the retrieval process is not constantly interrupted.
Administrative dashboard: Administrators should be able to control user access to email archives and custom policies through a dashboard. The dashboard needs to generate accurate data tables and visualization so decision-makers can be informed about space used and access control. Advanced reporting tools in email archiving solutions can also identify inappropriate or sensitive email exchanges. This alerts administrators about usage patterns and user behaviors that violate corporate policy.
Electronic discovery (eDiscovery): eDiscovery is a legal requirement to search and recover electronic data for litigation or legal compliance. Companies should be able to set up tags and attributes to search emails based on sender/receiver information, dates, keywords, and so on. Multiple search query management is also recommended to speed up the search. Users can save or modify the searches without going through every individual search.
What are the Benefits of Email Archiving Software?
Storage cost savings: Depending on the size of a company, the amount of storage space they need for email can grow quickly. Archiving old emails can free space and increase email server performance.
Policy compliance: Email archiving ensures that an organization follows the proper email retention policy automatically. A complete solution allows users to retrieve their email from a secure server with ease. This saves money from paying auditors and lawyers when they spend time digging into all the emails. Those emails will be tamper-free because no employee can edit them on the storage server. It’s important to check with the local laws on the retention and security policy of email before buying the software.
Disaster recovery: While email archiving is not email backup, it can be used as a disaster recovery option. When companies experience email systems data loss such as hardware malfunctions or cyberattacks, they can recover their email quickly. If only part of the emails got lost, they can recover that specific part instead of restoring the whole system.
Email security: The best email archive solution protects email messages through a mail server. Data archiving doesn't always have to do a fast search, but it does have to encrypt email communications to prevent cyberattacks.
Business continuity: When the email exchange server is down, some solutions allow the user to send and receive emails from their server. This acts as a business continuity email service so users don’t miss important email exchanges online.
Who Uses Email Archiving Software?
Employees: Anyone in the organization should be able to use this tool to retrieve their emails.
Email managers: Email managers should be able to set archiving permissions and policies through this software. They can also prevent inappropriate email exchange by analyzing risky user patterns and irregular content reports. This could save the company from potential competitive intelligence or espionage.
Legal entities: Court, lawyers, and auditors need to use e-Discovery tools for litigation and legal purposes. It saves them time to find the necessary documents because email archiving solutions can filter and search based on names, email addresses, keywords, and so on.
Challenges with Email Archiving Software
Email archiving solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Slow email retrieval: Since the email is saved on archive servers, it can be slow to download and upload from that server. Archive storage is inexpensive because it is compensated by a slow transfer speed. Multiple users retrieving at once also slows the server. Buyers need to make sure that the email archive solution server ensures a specific data transfer speed according to the requirement.
Email retrieval access: Unauthorized email access to the archive server can leak important company trade secrets and sensitive information. Email managers need to set the right access for each account on day one.
Redundancy with other backup software: Companies today have other disaster recovery and backup solutions that do similar things as email archive software. While the email archive has its own unique functionality and use case, the cost to store multiple copies of emails with different software can rise significantly with time. Buyers need to make sure that the future storage cost doesn’t exceed the budget.
Which Companies Should Buy Email Archiving Software?
While all companies that use email should consider email archiving solutions, below are the two industries that especially need the software:
Finance industry: The financial industry is heavily regulated so it requires email archiving to meet local laws. There are incentives for companies and employees to alter email copies for financial gains. Email archiving solutions prevent that by guaranteeing tamper-free email copies. Also, financial documents have industry words and numbers that are hard to discover. Many email archiving solutions provide search options that can include keywords and similar terms to find the right content quickly. Generic email searches often lack this functionality, making them inferior solutions that fail to meet the industry needs.
Healthcare industry: Sensitive email exchanges between healthcare providers and patients are regulated by governments and targeted by cyberattacks/ransoms. Having an archive solution prevents unauthorized temperament of emails, ensures compliance, and provides business continuity. Since patient care can be very time sensitive, sending and receiving emails on time may save lives.
How to Buy Email Archiving Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Email Archiving Software
Buyers may be tempted to create long lists of detailed requirements or ones that are too vague. Ideally, an RFI should be detailed enough to cover the essential requirements but not too long to discourage employees and vendors from using it. Since not all requirements have the same importance, buyers should assign them priorities and focus on the most important ones.
Must-have features are critical features that the company needs to run its daily operations based on their industry. For example, financial companies need software that can process financial search terms and secure email temperament policy.
Important requirements should have a high priority but aren’t necessarily deal breakers if there is a replacement. For example, advanced analytics and dashboards to predict user patterns are important but not critical when the buyer already uses employee monitoring software that can analyze email content.
Nice-to-have features may vary by department and team. For example, mobile apps that can retrieve email on a phone instead of a PC are useful but oftentimes unnecessary.
Compare Email Archiving Software Products
Create a long list
When making a long list, it should have no more than 10 products selected by eliminating all options that are not a good fit for the buyer. An easy start is to check what email software the company is using. The email archive software needs to be compatible with the company’s email software. If a company is using Gmail, they shouldn’t buy an archiver that focuses on on-premises since Gmail is a SaaS product. Also, users need to look into the legal requirements (such as GDPR data protection) for their company and industry. Some software solutions ensure regulatory compliance with specific laws, but that doesn’t guarantee that they always do. Email archiving software is changed by the number of users and/or space used for storage. Users can calculate an ideal budget based on that and filter out companies that don't meet it.
Create a short list
The products in the long list can be very similar at first sight, so buyers need more details about the products and the vendors to create a short list. This is where the requirements list comes in handy. Decision makers use this list to generate RFIs, which ask vendors to provide detailed information on how they deliver the features needed by the buyer. Some vendors may decline to respond to RFIs, which automatically disqualifies them from the selection process. Others are eliminated because they provided unsatisfactory responses.
Vendors also provide testimonials, customer references, and technical documentation to prove that they have the qualifications and expertise to deliver the product on time and within budget.
Conduct demos
Demos should be conducted live, not with slide decks or screenshots. Vendors should follow a script with scenarios created by the buyer. An example of a scenario would be to show how the system can save copies of emails, search specific emails based on industry terms, and retrieve the email on time. Buyers should take notes of the speed of data transfer and space used to store emails, as not all compression, data transfer, and storage options are created the same.
All email archive vendors should use the same demo script, and buyers need to rate each criterion and scenario using a rating system such as scores from one to five (where one is the lowest rating and five the highest).
All members of the selection team who attend demos should rate the functionality being demonstrated. The results can then be combined and analyzed to identify the main strengths and weaknesses of each product.
Selection of Email Archiving Software
Choose a selection team
IT managers, auditors, lawyers, and some end users should be included in the selection team. External consultants and outsourced IT teams may also provide a neutral perspective or help with negotiation.
Negotiation
Understandably, companies want to reduce costs during pricing negotiations, but this should not happen to the users' detriment. Instead, it is preferable to focus on getting the most value for the money. An example is customer support, which is included in the software's price but is usually limited to working hours and weekdays. Global companies may require 24/7 follow-the-sun support, which means that issues can be passed between teams in different time zones, so the users do not have to wait too long for a resolution.
Negotiation also includes legal and contractual terms, as well as service level agreements (SLAs). One example is cloud uptime, which guarantees that SaaS archiving products are operational. Most vendors provide an uptime of 95% and higher, but even a few hours a month can be very disruptive for regulated companies in finance and healthcare.
Final decision
The final decision should be made by a team, not a single person. It is also essential to use a structured approach and the data gathered during the previous phases. Decision support systems can prioritize requirements, identify the strengths and weaknesses of each product, and create various buying scenarios.
