Are Your Emails Safe? Email Archiving Can Save You Millions

Communication tools come and go, but email remains the king of communication.

Email-initiated correspondence is so important in the business world that it's almost impossible for an organization to function without exchanging email data. Large corporations, midsize companies, and even small businesses use email to transact work, exchange information, and connect with clients and other companies. 

But what happens to all your important emails when your computer crashes? Or worse, what if someone steals sensitive data from your company's server?

From being a communication tool to augmenting the capabilities of other software, an email server has become an integral part of any organization's IT infrastructure. With this in mind, today's businesses are looking for ways to improve their email systems for better performance and to safeguard the flow of digital information.

One way businesses can avoid data loss is through email archiving. Implementing email archiving software reduces the risk of losing email data. The email messages are easily retrieved if users delete or lose important emails.

Email archiving is one of the most useful methods of data management. This process involves retaining email messages that business entities send and receive. It covers everything from retrieval to record-keeping and regulatory compliance, among other things.

With the number of emails growing every day, you need an organized approach to manage them better. It’s quite easy to categorize, manage, and retrieve archived information with little effort. Bulk email archiving also helps reduce time spent managing messages and lower storage and system costs.

In 2020 alone, an estimated 306.4 billion emails were sent and received every day. Saving each email is pointless. It adds to the cost and duration of the e-discovery processes. It's also untrustworthy to rely on users to archive their emails. When they forget or don’t know what to archive, a business is held accountable, especially if the email is required for litigation or audit purposes. 

Archiving the emails manually is a tedious process, and you need a robust solution to help you with it. An email archiving solution does all the heavy lifting and archives, stores, and retains emails for you automatically.

Importance of email archiving

Email is not only an essential form of digital communication; it's also a vital information source for businesses. But, managing this asset can be difficult. Data sent via email is not stored in a separate location but in the employees' mailboxes, creating many data silos with years of knowledge that broadens daily.

Preserving this knowledge over time so that peers can use it is critical to a company's success. There are five main reasons an organization should archive its emails.

1. Business continuity

The average downtime for a business after a ransomware attack is 21 days. This amounts to nearly millions lost in missed opportunities. This downtime is only for organizations with adequate backups. If a company doesn’t have proper backups, it’ll spend more time recovering emails, setting up new domains, and performing other time-consuming and troublesome tasks.

Every employee in your organization has many business-critical email messages in their inbox. During a disaster, they may need to access critical services and data most likely contained in these email messages. Email archiving enables businesses to keep a repository of all inbound and outbound emails that can be quickly backed up and retrieved.

Many businesses include backups of their devices, files, and servers as part of their business disaster recovery (BDR) strategy. They usually ignore saving email messages. This is where an archiving solution assists email admins to protect email messages from getting corrupt and quickly restores accounts with intact contents.

2. Compliance

While all businesses are subject to compliance commitment that requires the retention and production of company information, some sectors are subject to more stringent and sometimes demanding regulatory requirements. 

Financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and energy are some sectors under strict compliance regulations. Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are some of the mandatory regulations businesses must follow.

Businesses should look for an archiving solution that meets their compliance requirements. Most regulated industries require solutions with a policy-based, granular approach that retains data for a specific time frame.

3. Legal support

Businesses operate in environments that are constantly critiqued and subject to litigation or legal investigations. Litigation discovery is the process where a court of law asks the parties involved in litigation to submit case-relevant data.

In the event of an audit, e-discovery, or inquiry involving the company, the company must search its files and provide all related information to the court. It's crucial to make the submission in a reasonable timeframe without depleting resources. The cost of producing details for litigation can be enormous, often outweighing the damages pursued in a lawsuit.

This is common for companies lacking an appropriate email archiving strategy. Email archiving solutions securely and systematically store records of emails in a central, easy-to-search repository where individuals cannot tamper with the email content.

4. Knowledge management

A company’s email system serves as an enterprise knowledge repository. It can contain a large amount of valuable email data that, often critical to a business. Allowing users access to this corporate asset can make them more productive. Even organizations that use tools to silo information, such as CRM software, still depend heavily on email to communicate clearly.

An email archiving system provides suitable knowledge management tools such as email record sorting, advanced search, and retrieval functions. This allows IT admins and end-users to manage the knowledge base within a company's email archive.

5. Storage management

Businesses often use email storage quotas to prevent message stores from expanding and degrading server performance. The disadvantage of quotas is their impact on end-user productivity. Quotas can have more severe consequences than simply preventing users from using their email when they run out of storage space. For example, quotas and resulting roadblocks can force users to delete critical emails to allow for new emails.

The rise in email usage and the relative increase in email size impact corporate email servers' efficiency, dependability, and speed. As a result, storing email online requires more physical storage space and hardware to manage the server loads. Email compliance regulations have also contributed to the increased demand for storage.

While storage solutions can solve the issue of growing email storage, an email archiving system is a much better option. Besides creating a centralized email repository, archiving software compresses the email messages, resulting in significant savings in disk usage compared to conventional mail storage. 

An email archiving solution archives business emails without locally storing bulky PST files. Given that PST files need 2 to 5 times the physical storage capacity of an email archive, this would result in significant storage savings.

How does email archiving work?

Archiving emails one at a time is a challenge. The majority of emails are stored on your system or a server on the internet. This depends on the user’s email system.

Archiving emails stored locally

When you have an email app installed on the system, the email is stored in the app's file folder. Most desktop email clients include a menu option for archiving a copy of your email. The function is the same in all email programs, but the terminology or process may vary slightly.

A standard procedure is to select the email folder or directory you want to archive, then choose "File > Save As" or "File > Archive" or "File > Export" or something similar. Sometimes users are asked to specify the format in which they want to save their email.

Archiving emails stored remotely

Emails are stored on remote servers by web-based email services. Only a few major, well-known web-based services allow users to download their email from the email servers. Others require users to pay for a premium service. You may not be able to download emails when using their free service.

Most web-based email services have two ways of archiving remote emails: individually archiving an email by moving it from the inbox to the archive folder and bulk archiving a large number of emails to the archive folder.

Email archiving solutions

The above methods of archiving emails rely on users to keep each archive updated. IT can back up a user's email, but it can take weeks to track anything specific. The advent of software providing highly specialized email archiving services help companies curate data from thousands of mailboxes.

Several third-party email archiving solutions enable businesses to archive emails and perform other mail organization tasks. An email archive tool enhances an existing email system. The admin can configure rules to specify which emails are moved to the archive and when, or whether they should be deleted from the server's mailboxes once archived. The system then stores these in a secure, accessible cloud environment.

The email archiving platform generates a searchable index, sifting bulk emails in minutes. Businesses typically get an email archiving option as part of comprehensive software as a service (SaaS) suite for backup and disaster recovery, email governance, or information lifecycle management. Some vendors offer email archiving as a stand-alone product too.

Types of email archiving solutions

A good email archiving system can help organizations track information quickly. Functionalities such as search functions can locate information without technical complications. This ability to quickly find data on the storage drives helps employees work efficiently.

On-premise email archiving 

On-premise email archiving is also known as in-house email archiving. It necessitates the customer to purchase the software and hardware infrastructure requiring installation in the organization's server environment.

An in-house email archiving option entails storing the email archives on a server within the corporate facility. The greatest benefit of on-premise archiving is that sensitive material is stored behind the company firewall and managed by internal employees. This allows for more control over data integrity and confidentiality. Because the organization solely and independently depends on its own resources, it can examine its compliance status at any time.

The main drawback is the high initial investment and the immediate impact the platform could have on the business's IT division. To set up an internal email archive, the organization must first buy a suitable email archiving software and the hardware (server) to house the archive.

Cloud-based email archiving

Cloud-based email archiving solutions are cheaper to implement than on-premise alternatives. Businesses can get started right away without investing in hardware or IT resources. Running expenditures is also inexpensive because the supplier typically implements new capabilities and software/hardware updates.

In a cloud-hosted solution, a software program on the business’ mail server records all email messages. It sends the messages offsite through the internet to a third-party data warehouse for archiving. Authorized users can then use a web browser or a suitable email application to view offsite data.

Email archiving vs. email backup

Despite several alternative communication tools, email remains the most powerful communication tool for businesses worldwide. Because of this constant dependence on email, email archiving and backup are critical to business continuity. However, the narrative becomes more difficult for enterprises that need to meet regulatory standards and prepare for e-discovery.

While email archiving and backup are linked business operations, there are still some misconceptions about the difference between backup and archive. People frequently use these phrases interchangeably, but they are different solutions.

Since you're wondering if you need an email backup or archive system, the answer is simple: you need both for different reasons. Email backup and archiving operate in unison to provide the most comprehensive solution for storing and safeguarding business-critical data.

Email backup

An email backup is a snapshot of the business email database at a specific point in time. At any given moment, only one snapshot exists in the backup, which means the old backup is deleted before the new one replaces it. 

Suppose emails are mistakenly deleted or damaged, and a new backup is created before admins can restore them. In this case, the emails are lost permanently when the latest backup replaces the old one.

Email backup is designed to save data in the short and medium term and obtain a regular snapshot of the email database. This approach enables the creation of copies of entire data sets, which can then be moved to an external storage or a cloud environment and later recovered. As a result, a backup serves only as a disaster recovery tool to transfer temporary, backed-up data sets back from external storage during data loss.

An email backup solution often produces temporary copies of the data on the email server on an external storage device or the cloud. Here, the term temporary means that data within the backup is rewritten or erased (as with incremental backups) or wiped according to a predetermined schedule if the backup file is no longer required. Creating these duplicates doesn’t prevent the need for mailbox quotas. Full mailboxes and the often associated need to exchange emails annoy both users and IT admins.

Backups can restore essential data lost due to errors, mechanical failures, or operational concerns, but the procedure doesn’t allow a quick search for individual emails. Backups are less helpful for safeguarding unstructured corporate data since they cannot be searched.

Email archiving

Email archiving permits easy and efficient information management and acts as a mechanism to categorize and store data. It's one of the most crucial aspects of a digital enterprise strategy. Archived emails can be stored on the local network or the cloud platform and users can take better advantage of its features and functionalities.

Email archiving is required by law for many companies in regulated areas such as financial operations, healthcare, or legal services. It provides specific tools for keeping email records tamper-proof, traceable, and recoverable for an audit, HR investigation, or litigation. 

Email archiving is meant for large-scale data preservation, regulatory compliance, and e-discovery. It safely indexes and archives all emails while providing instant access and searchability of business emails and other crucial messages.

Professional email archiving systems keep data "tamper-proof" by encrypting it, generating hash values, limiting user capabilities, and maintaining audit records of vital activity. All emails are saved in their original Write Once Read Many (WORM) compliant format and cannot be modified. This implies that archiving emails guarantees that a company complies with all applicable regulations.

Both email archiving and backups provide deduplication and compression of email content and attachments, resulting in less consumption of storage space. However, unlike email backup solutions, email archiving helps delete archived items from the server, considerably reducing storage requirements.

Some platforms store a comprehensive index of the contents and metadata of saved emails and attachments. This allows end-users to search for certain emails in the live system quickly and effectively without relying on the IT admin.

Email archiving best practices

Since email is one of an organization's most valuable assets, the ability to preserve it through archiving is critical. Technological advances have greatly aided the process of archiving emails and provided some best practices to follow.

• Ensure data security. Companies risk compliance if their archived data isn’t secure. Any data leaving the environment should always be encrypted to ensure its safety. Consider a cloud email archiving solution that safeguards the information in transit and at rest in the cloud infrastructure.
• Customize the email retention period. If an admin inadvertently sets "retain everything" as the default policy for a company's archiving strategy, it can cause a major problem. The volume of data in the archive will affect performance and increase storage costs and distorted data insights. A business must first identify the different types of users to determine the retention period.
• Email compliance is maintained. Regulatory compliance requires companies to retain sensitive data and make it accessible when needed. Your email archiving strategy must include appropriate retention periods for various categories of information. For example, HIPAA compliance requires a company to keep health data for seven years.
• Using cloud storage resources for email archiving: Email messaging platforms such as Office 365, Mimecast, Gmail, and Cloudian offer cloud-based email archiving capabilities. A cloud archive offers benefits such as less need to migrate data from one platform to another, longer data durability, increased scalability of resources to accommodate archiving requirements, and the potential to lower archiving costs over legacy storage.

Benefits of email archiving

Email archiving is essential for email management to ensure that valuable business data and correspondence are securely stored and retained for the long term. Besides allowing end-users and personnel to view emails promptly, an email archiving platform simplifies optimizing server performance and fulfilling storage quotas while retaining critical data. Benefits of adopting email archiving tools and services include:

• Data loss prevention. Critical data is lost if employees accidentally delete emails or their entire inbox is wiped when they leave the organization. All emails, including attachments, are retained in the archive for future access with email archiving software.
• Easy data retrieval. Individual emails and attachments are easily retrieved using email archiving tools. If a user deletes or misplaces a valuable email, it's swiftly recovered with the help of a good email archiving solution. The metadata is also retrieved when the email is recovered, making it easier to sort the data summary and find the information you're looking for.
• Reduced storage costs. Cost-effective storage management is an important reason to invest in email archiving solutions. Archiving emails can help reduce the storage space occupied by business emails. Emails and attachments are frequently compressed using archiving methods. They also employ deduplication techniques to ensure that only one copy of each email is archived. This is often not the case when storing emails on mail servers, as forwarding emails frequently results in two versions of the same email message and uses up your storage allowance unnecessarily.

Challenges of email archiving

At first, getting started with email archiving might seem like a straightforward process. The objectives are simple: create duplicate email transactions and store them for later retrieval. However, there are many major challenges that accompany the archiving strategy.

• Legacy email archiving practices: Although business practices and IT systems have evolved, email archiving really hasn’t. Many of the email archiving solutions today, such as Office 365, are not built for recent usage patterns. Although they effectively take in data, discovering and extracting relevant data is difficult. This creates a number of IT and end-user workflow issues.
• Increased cost: Outdated email archives have a lower return on investment (ROI). Running and maintaining an on-premises email archiving system needs continuous effort and expenditure to upgrade and renew both hardware and software. Additionally, sustaining this infrastructure requires retaining more expensive IT admins and support staff. Despite efficient data management strategies such as setting mailbox quotas and retention periods, storage costs often exceed expectations as data quantities grow.

Best email archiving solutions

Email archiving system compresses and retains emails older than a specific user-defined age for future reference or audit. These platforms allow businesses to preserve complete logs of all email exchanges without consuming much storage space.

Companies can monitor employee email conversations, sales email engagement records, and more by preserving emails for a complete view of the conversational record. IT departments can use email archiving systems to save email history, helping HR departments, management, sales teams, and others to audit archived emails and make business decisions.

A product must meet the following to be included in the email archiving category:

• Allow keyword searches to filter stored emails
• Encrypt saved emails and use additional security measures to keep them safe
• Compress and save emails older than a particular age

*Below are the five leading email archiving platforms based on G2 data collected on November 8, 2021. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.*

1. Mimecast Cloud Archive

Mimecast Cloud Archive is an industry-standard email archiving solution. It provides three tamper-proof encrypted copies to secure your email content from data loss for long-term data preservation. Mimecast stores all of a business' emails in a highly secure vault. The software saves all inbound, outbound, and internal email exchanges, together with extensive meta-data, enabling easy searching using powerful e-discovery.

The software also generates data that reveal when and who viewed the archive. This can help a company stay compliant and support legal arguments. The platform also includes capabilities that allow users to access their own archives, which is vital for managing old clients. Mimecast is a popular choice for businesses that appreciate the archive's rapid e-discovery times and ease of use, especially on mobile devices.

What users like:

"Mimecast's best feature is to search and validate any URLs and attachments. That connection is routed over the Mimecast network, and the user is not allowed to access it if the link is malicious. Even if something does not appear correctly, it'll preserve the email and remind the recipient of the attachments. It saves a lot of time and lets us quickly identify malware."

-  Mimecast Cloud Archive Review, André A.

What users dislike:

"Would be good to have an ingestion of emails straight from Office 365 instead of PST upload (still in beta last time I checked)."

-  Mimecast Cloud Archive Review, Paris W.

2. Jatheon Archiving Suite

Jatheon Archiving Suite is a flexible, on-premise email archiving system that enables organizations globally to collect, store, manage, and recover electronic communications such as email, social media, text messages, phone calls, and instant messaging. The archiving platform provides a cost-effective solution for medium to big enterprises with compliance, archiving, and storage needs.

Jatheon's solutions, built entirely with server-grade hardware, lets businesses activate various modules according to their specific archiving needs. In addition, users can host the email software in a virtual environment as a virtual archiving solution.

What users like:

"There are a few things I like about the Jatheon Archiving Suite. First, the deployment process is easy, and the tool is easily customizable. This software comes with great security features, and uploading as well as retrieving emails is seamless. The tool is also accessible as it's cloud-based and there is both a web and mobile version."

-  Jatheon Archiving Suite Review, Florence G.

What users dislike:

"I don't like the interface. It's not intuitive, and I have to read the manual frequently when I want to accomplish something. Too bad that it can't act as a mail server in times of crisis. It's just a repository for email that flows through your system. There are redundancies built into the Jatheon solution, but they are all just an archiver."

-  Jatheon Archiving Suite Review, John M. D.

3. Barracuda Essentials

Barracuda Essentials is an email archiving platform made up of three cloud services: a secure email gateway, a continuity service, and an archiving service. The email archive is indexed for quick e-discovery using a search engine built into the storage environment.

IT admins can alter email retention regulations based on the email’s content. Users can also put identified email communications required for legal proceedings to a "legal hold" status, protecting it from manipulation. As a result, it's a suitable platform for businesses to establish legal compliance, such as those in the financial industry.

The secure email gateway provides a continuity service by keeping all passed-through emails for 96 hours. All business inboxes are mirrored on the server, and employees can access their emails using a web browser during email server outages. 

Employees can also use the gateway mail system to send emails to the company's domain. When the primary mail server returns to operation, the system will update it with the emails received during its downtime. The secure email gateway also prevents the spread of spam emails and emails carrying malware, phishing, and impersonation attacks.

What users like:

"Barracuda Essentials is a great complete tool that we use with a complete solution to protect our emails and data in Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange. What I also like is protection against advanced threats from Zero-Day attacks and protection against deletions and hacking of information."

-  Barracuda Essentials Review, Gabriel S.

What users dislike:

"I dislike the layout of the site. I found it a bit difficult to navigate when I was on my mobile device. I also would quarantine items that had been accepted in the past."

-  Barracuda Essentials Review, Neisha P.

4. N-able Mail Assure

N-able Mail Assure (formerly known as SolarWinds Mail Assure) is a cloud-based email archiving platform that enables businesses to stay in control of and secure inbound and outbound emails. The software provides email protection by leveraging collective threat intelligence, ensuring email continuity, and an email archiving facility.

The solution employs real-time artificial intelligence to detect spam, viruses, phishing assaults, ransomware, malware, and other email-borne dangers. Outbound emails are automatically examined for data leakage. N-able Mail Assure is most commonly used by mid-sized organizations and businesses in the IT and services industry.

What users like:

"The Mail Assure interface is very user friendly and easy to navigate, providing plenty of customization options for tweaking spam threshold settings. The logs have plenty of filtering options making it quick to find problematic emails."

-  N-able Mail Assure Review, Steven W.

What users dislike:

"The only thing I would say is lacking is that Mail Assure doesn't seem to be good at preventing spoofed emails that come from a garbage email address. But the email signature matches perhaps the president of the company or another person in a high-level position. This is a huge problem for our customers."

-  N-able Mail Assure Review, Nathan S.

5. Gmail Backup Tool

Gmail Backup Tool, also known as Aryson Gmail Backup Tool, is a Windows-based email backup tool that can back up emails from personal and business Gmail accounts. The platform allows users to store email backups in various file formats, including PST, EML, MBOX, PDF, MSG, EMLX, HTML, and TXT.

The tool also permits users to transfer email messages from one Gmail account to Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Thunderbird, Office 365, and IMAP accounts. Gmail Backup Tool is compatible with all versions of Windows OS, including Windows 10 and earlier. It allows users to store emails from their Gmail account as PST files that can be viewed with any version of the Microsoft Outlook application. It also stores email backups as EML files, which are readily imported into Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, and Apple Mail.

What users like:

"It saves a lot of headaches related to managing Gmail in different formats like pdf, HTML, PST, etc. If a file is deleted accidentally, this tool easily retrieves the desired file. The user interface is pretty simple and easy. It has an auto-backup mechanism to protect my Gmail files."

-  Gmail Backup Tool Review, Dhiraj G.

What users dislike:

"I find it costly for me. Also, its free version doesn't allow saving in different file formats."

-  Gmail Backup Tool Review, Din B.

Are you missing out on essential email data? Not anymore!

Email archiving assures the users that their email messages and data are safe, even if the sender or receiver deletes the messages from their mailbox. Archiving email ensures statutory compliance and helps avoid legal problems.

This is especially useful for companies like banks and financial institutions that frequently rely on documented proof like emails to defend their interests in a lawsuit.

Discover free email archiving software to protect your business and data.