On more than one occasion I have worked with a customer whose email archiving strategy could be stated like this.

“When people stop working for us we never, ever delete their mailbox.”

As you might guess from the title of this post, that is not really “email archiving”.  You could call it “email keeping”, but I would put it as “creates more problems than it solves”.

If your email archiving strategy is to have no strategy at all, and that’s a deliberate decision by your organization, then consider some of the problems that you are creating.

• Every mailbox you keep adds to the size of the database, which therefore consumes more disk space, and more backup media
• Larger databases take longer to back up, and longer to recover if there is a problem
• Every mailbox you keep is an active mailbox that can potentially continue to receive emails, increasing your storage needs at a rate faster than necessary
• Every mailbox you keep is also an active user account, leaving a potential attack vector for hackers or disgruntled former staff
• When the time comes to migrate to a new email server, the amount of data to move is that much larger
• Keeping emails in mailboxes on an Exchange server (prior to Exchange 2010 which relatively few organizations have moved to yet) does not make them easily auditable

Email Archiving Solutions

A proper email archiving strategy can be conceived and executed with the right archiving solution.  Here are some of the ways that email archiving can be implemented.

• 100% of inbound/outbound email is journaled and archived at the time of transit for historical record.  This can be done to meet legal or regulatory compliance requirements if necessary.
• Email items that exceed a certain age threshold are removed from mailboxes into the archive store.  This is one method for keeping mailbox sizes down.
• Mailboxes that reach a certain “watermark” or size also have their oldest items removed to the archive store, even if they are not yet old enough.  This also helps keep overall mailbox sizes down.
• Mailboxes for inactive users are sent to the archive store and removed from the server entirely.  This allows email for former staff to remain accessible without impacting the email server.
• The archive store is in one or two centralized locations, which consolidates email archives down to as few main data centers as possible regardless of the number of actual email servers in operation.
• The archive store is end user-accessible, secure, and searchable for easy access to archive items for both users and auditors.

The cost to implement these types of solutions is often less than the ongoing costs of maintaining all of that data within the production email servers.  And instead of creating problems, a genuine email archiving strategy creates solutions and improves the email environment for everyone.