5 practices to help archiving emails

Today, more than 4 billion people in the world send and receive e-mails every day. If these are work-related messages, they may contain sensitive data or information that is extremely valuable to the company. Some of them may even be used as proof of compliance or used in a lawsuit. For this reason, email archiving is already an essential business process.

However, not all archiving is done well. To get the most out of this feature, we'll outline five practices that anyone responsible for email archiving in a company should know.

What is NOT archiving?

There's more to email archiving than just backups. The primary purpose of creating them is to make e-mails available and prevent business interruptions in the event of a failure. However, backup systems are in a constant replacement cycle, old messages being replaced with new ones. This leaves gaps as any deleted or corrupted emails will be lost after the update. Archiving, on the other hand, is used for long-term storage of messages. The purpose is to share emails for compliance, auditing and regulatory purposes. The archiving system does not overwrite messages, but instead adds them to the archive. Once emails are archived, they cannot be changed or deleted, which is important for compliance with record keeping and retention laws.

Get to know regulations

One of the practical uses of archiving is to make sure that your organization is complying with the laws regarding record keeping. Legal requirements related to e-mail cover many aspects of archiving, such as storage time, availability or security. When choosing a tool, make sure it meets all the requirements necessary to comply with the regulations that apply to your industry.

Archiving automation

Maintaining, protecting, and managing an email archive that complies with regulations can put a significant strain on your IT department. Manually archiving incoming and outgoing emails manually would take a huge amount of time. However, you can simplify this process by automating it. This will ensure instant archiving and storage of messages.

Simplification of processes

Archiving must be simple, otherwise it is very easy to make a mistake in following its rules. Some solutions are directly connected to email clients. Becoming an integral part of the mail system, archiving messages becomes part of the regular workflow of users. It is also important that the solution offers centralized control that allows administrators to quickly archive, search and access content across the company.

Solid security is paramount

E-mails can contain very sensitive data, so you should take all possible security measures. The archiving solution must enforce multi-level permission-based access controls to protect access to messages. Additionally, archived emails should be encrypted both in storage and in transit using standard encryption.

Speed matters

Even small businesses can have hundreds of emails to search. For larger enterprises, they may have thousands of messages stored over the years to find. If it is necessary to search the archive, the archiving tool must be fast and accurate.

Whichever solution you choose, it must perfectly match your business needs and align with your business processes. It also needs to be easy to use and work seamlessly with email applications.

 MailStore is ideally based on five principles of fast and secure archiving, optimizing the archive to meet the requirements of any modern enterprise.

To learn more, please contact Damian Malinowski, who  takes care of Mailstore in our company.