Although we take email for granted, the use of email can easily get out of control for administrators. People rarely walk down to another office to have a discussion or idea exchange.  Writing an email that can be sent to multiple people with attachments slowly uses up massive amounts of hard disk space.

For any organization, this massive storage usage creeps up.  Savvy administrators keep an eye on these behind-the-scene scenarios that create this creeping storage nightmare:

• People are trying to maintain their position by copying everybody who’s anybody, which duplicates emails.
• People have that “pack rat” mentality and keep years worth of emails within folders. This includes the document attachments.
• Email box quotas attempt to manage disk space, but many staff find a way to circumvent this process to get approval to have their quota increased.
• The IT department gets tagged for managing high I/O hardware processing, whiling balancing backup storage costs.
• Let’s not forget the IT department’s added burden of trying to control bulging email data stores.

Email archiving helps eliminate these issues or at least implement controls for better storage resource manageability. There are various types of archiving solutions. For example, stubbing is often a key variable involved in the email archiving solution. Stubbing creates a pointer, which is maintained on the email server, such as Microsoft Exchange.  The original message and attachments is moved over to an alternate archive storage area. When a user wants to look up a historical email, the stub is referenced. Then that message is retrieved from archive. This provides the benefit of a reducing the size of the mailbox.

Although stubbing eliminates the problem of mailbox storage, over time problems can arise. Email stubs can actually cause server performance issues. This is caused by the increase in the number of messages and related stubs being pointed back and forth. This may result in stubbing being a finger in the dyke approach that does not curtail the growing email storage problem.

Other alternatives for facilitating archive storage of email includes:

• Eliminating personal folders. This removes the burden of users to maintain their own local email storage. No longer do users need to purge mailboxes to comply with quota limits and, since there are no local PST files, email performance is improved while reducing the risk of data loss.
• Trimming duplicate emails through single instance stores (SIS) reduces space taken up by multiple copies, which greatly reduces storage requirements.
• Instant access to archives without the need for quotas and stubbing. Users can store as much email as they like without incurring the performance hit that stubbing introduces.
• End user self-service allows continuous access to archived email. Content indexing allows email users to access all email, while providing improved searching capabilities.