Definition

Message archiving is a system wide method to protect and save electronic data in e-mail communications so it can be organized, searched, and accessed quickly at a later date.

Business Applications

Historically, the user was responsible to keep copies of their e-mail messages, either by copying to disk, or printing them on paper to file. IT departments would backup the entire e-mail system, but only for catastrophic repairs--not to recall, or search single messages. A particular e-mail thread between two or more people could take days or even weeks to track down.

With the rise of regulatory and compliance laws, there became a need to find e-mail and trace its path within minutes. Policy based archiving software is available from many vendors, and allows messaging  administrators to manage a large volume of e-mail data, as well as clean up space on production systems that increase performance. These software packages offer tools that allow indexing, searching, and even the ability to trace e-mail threads between many users, which satisfies the newer legal discovery laws in the case that an e-mail chain is subpoenaed for use in court.

Deployment Concerns

Archiving all of a company’s e-mail can lead to a vast storage farm that can end up costing more than your messaging infrastructure. It is a good idea to seek the assistance of your legal and archiving software vendor for the best design and architecture for archiving. It may be necessary to only archive a small number of your users, or to expunge records after 1, 5 or 7 years. Some records may need to be archived indefinitely.

A software vendor may also have best practices on deployment to reduce the need for larger bandwidth in the servers, either in storage or networking. The need to duplicate all e-mail  messages may also increase CPU load on your existing messaging servers, so a proper audit of existing servers would also be beneficial during the design process.

Technical details

There are a large number of vendors and many e-mail systems that support message archiving. The basic process is that when a message comes in or out of the e-mail server, a duplicate is created. This duplicate message is then sent to a proprietary system that tags and indexes the message for later retrieval. This is transparent to the user.

Some software packages allow the user to retrieve archived messages, but not delete or alter them. If a  purge time is set, a background process is used to comb through the archive and remove the old messages that are set to expire. Since this is done in line, it could--depending on the software--double the load on the server, network, and storage systems that are used in the messaging infrastructure.