The administrator may appropriately be tasked with administering, or at least overseeing, the process of email archiving, if for no other reason than the fact that end-users are not likely to do it themselves. The process of archiving emails, if left to individual end-users, would be chaotic at best. Uniform standards must apply, and archiving needs to be done according to a rule-based procedure; without such a rule-based procedure, the enterprise risks falling out of compliance with one or more legislative mandates.

But there are two pieces to the archiving puzzle: Putting things into it, and taking things out of it. The first part can be largely automated and done according to a set of rules that specify that emails get archived after a certain period of time. But as for the other end—searching the archives—that’s another story entirely.

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