Wikify: date=November 2007

Email archiving is a stand-alone IT application that works with an email server to help manage an organization's email messages. It captures and preserves all email traffic flowing into and out of the email server so it can be accessed quickly at a later date from a centrally managed location. When the need arises to search historical email for internal investigations or for a court-ordered legal discovery, organizations can search thousands of email records in seconds using search tools embedded in the email archiving system.

There are email archiving applications to support email messaging systems, and they can be installed in-house or can perform as a hosted service. In addition to email and attachments, some email archiving applications also archive all aspects of a mailbox including public folders, offline PST files, calendars, contacts, notes, and associated metadata and context. Email archiving can also enable applications for end-user search, data protection, disaster recovery, eDiscovery, and compliance supervision.

Email archiving applications capture email content on magnetic disk storage in one of two methods. One method is to capture email directly from the email application itself. (e.g. Microsoft Exchange, IBM Notes, Novell GroupWise). The alternative method captures email content during transport via an agent installed at network gateway.

There are multiple reasons why organizations implement email archiving:

• To enable email users who send and receive hundreds of email messages each day to have unlimited mailbox capacity and fingertip access to years' worth of email
• To offload data from the production email server for increased performance and storage efficiency while preserving access to end users
• To meet litigation, regulatory, and/or business records retention requirements by enabling compliance and legal officers to easily search email stored in the archive

At a high level though there are two key approaches to using EAM (E-mail Archiving and Management) technology:

• As a part of your messaging infrastructure and storage activities • As an essential compliance and legal business application

Both approaches can be complex, and in some cases, may be industry-specific. Law firms, for example, use EAM technology very differently than manufacturing companies. Furthermore, individual enterprises have unique needs.

As a result, EAM vendors have developed a variety of approaches to meet these varied needs. For instance, Google/Postini's set of modules focuses on security and the filtering of e-mail traffic to eliminate spam and non-compliance. CA provides sophisticated records management and compliance applications for e-mail. Autonomy Zantaz focuses on E-discovery requirements. Mimosa and HP provide efficient backup and recovery for mail systems. The specific vendor evaluation chapters below provide detailed examples of the many different approaches. While most enterprises deploy EAM-related applications for a specific need or activity, all of these systems offer quite broad capabilities beyond their core focus elements. Some span across industries and provide a more general purpose – some would say “horizontal” – approach to EAM. Others home in on particular vertical industries such as financial services.