Email Archiving for Compliance

If your organization is like most today, an estimated 83 percent of your communications are electronic, with the vast majority going through your email system. New regulations require you to be able to produce on demand copies of messages in your email system. Microsoft Exchange Server's management and archival capabilities aren't adequate for most organizations in the face of these new requirements, so you might be in the market for an email archiving product. Here's a look at six contenders.

Problem and Solutions
Exchange's archiving support is lacking in that Exchange has no direct way to store messages for extended periods of time without keeping them in the Exchange Information Store (IS). In addition, Exchange doesn't provide a search interface to easily find relevant messages when needed. Finally, the built-in "archiving" support in Exchange, called message journaling, provides granularity only down to the store level for controlling what gets archived.

In addition to addressing an organization's archiving needs for legal or regulatory compliance, a good archiving solution can greatly reduce the cost of Exchange management. To accomplish this, an archiving solution reduces mailbox size by removing items that don't need to be in the IS. This reduces the backup/restore and disaster recovery times and the storage requirements for the Exchange databases and backup data.

I recently tested six email archiving products, paying special attention to their ability to provide subpoenaed message data and address regulatory requirements. I also looked at products' ability to reduce individual mailbox size and reduce server and administrative overhead by removing and archiving messages and attachments to a location outside the IS.

When reviewing the products, I considered the impact of the archiving solution on end users. I noted the changes users would see in their mailbox and how they would search for and access items that have changed in their mailbox or that have been moved to an archive. Web Table 1 compares the features of the six products.

Most of the products in this review included support for stub messages, which replace the original message in Exchange with one that contains a URL link or custom form that opens the actual message in the archive. Some of the products in this review used a simple stub message that provided only a URL link to the real message, while others provided part of the text of the original message and/or a custom Microsoft Outlook form that made opening the archive message seamless for the end user. The key advantage of leaving part of the message text in the user's mailbox is that the user can still use desktop or Outlook search tools such as Google or MSN Search to find archived messages.

GFi MailArchiver for Exchange 3.0
Unlike other products in this review, GFi MailArchiver doesn't actually make any changes to mailboxes. The product copies messages to an archive; it doesn't remove messages from mailboxes or replace them with stub messages to reduce mailbox size. Figure 1 shows MailArchiver's administrative console.

MailArchiver uses Microsoft SQL Server to store messages and their attachments. For MailArchiver to get messages into the store, message journaling must be enabled on Exchange. Message journaling obtains only future messages; a separate utility in MailArchiver's install directory imports existing messages from mailboxes, personal folder stores (PSTs), and public folders.

A Web based UI provides the functionality needed to search the archive and manage MailArchiver's settings. Delegation support is provided by setting up managers who can view all messages for users in a selected Active Directory (AD) group.

At the Web interface, users can search items copied from their mailbox or any other mailboxes to which they've been delegated access. The search is limited to seven unique fields, and once messages are found, users can restore them only one at a time.

MailArchiver is the only product reviewed that uses IMAP to obtain message data if the product isn't installed on the Exchange server. For optimum performance, via Exchange OLE DB, MailArchiver must be installed on the Exchange server itself.