How do I save ALL emails?

[JBruyet]

Hey all,

I was just at an electronic records retention meeting yesterday and discovered that we're way out of compliance with our email retention. We thought that printing out emails and saving the hard copies was enough but that's not near enough. We need to be saving EVERY email that's sent or received regarding business dealings. So, does anyone know of a system that will automatically save all incoming and outgoing emails? If there's one that will be able to discriminate between jokes and legitimate emails that would be preferable, but were cutting WAY BACK on all budget items for next year. Wish me luck...

Thanks,

Joe B

 

[58sniper]

Any of the major archiving products will do this, including Mimosa's NearPoint, Symantec's Enterprise Vault, and GFI's MailArchiver. They require careful planning, and any for an environment over 20 people will require additional hardware and licenses.

BTW - printing out emails does NOTHING for you.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[ShackDaddy]

The VERY poor man's archiving is to merely create some journaling mailboxes on your server and enable journaling (properties on the mailbox database). You'll need a journaling mailbox for each of your mailbox databases. On each mailbox database, the journaling account would store a copy of every email sent or received from any mailbox on that mailbox database.

But a major burden of document compliance is the ability to provide requested information in a timely manner, and keeping all email, unindexed, in a single mailbox isn't very good for discovery. You really want to go with a 3rd party product.

Dave Shackelford
Shackelford Consulting

 

[58sniper]

But a major burden of document compliance is the ability to provide requested information in a timely manner, and keeping all email, unindexed, in a single mailbox isn't very good for discovery.

Nor is it good for storage, IOPS, backups, daily maintenance, etc.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[timmoat]

You can use a SAAS providor to perform mail archiving if you are of a size that does not warrent the investment in hardware/software and the training that goes with it.

MimeCast, Webroot are ones that I have used.

They capture all inbound/outbound email and you can use an Exchange 2007 Journaling Rule to capture all internal mail and route it directly to their archiving address.

For around 60 users this will cost around £3000.00 including archiving, business continuity (webmail service for users if your exchange box goes down, and full spam virus protection. Users have access to archive via their own login and you can even let them search their spam.

We use this and I can highly recommend. Also means that our bandwidth is not hit by large email sizes and spam.

Larger organisations of course will warrent the software/hardware under their own control but for the many SMB out there the above works out very well.

 

[58sniper]

They capture all inbound/outbound email and you can use an Exchange 2007 Journaling Rule to capture all internal mail and route it directly to their archiving address.

Many of those don't handle internal email. And journalling is a poor way to archive as it doesn't grab everything.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[ShackDaddy]

So what does journaling not grab? Mail in the drafts folder? I know that many solutions build their strategy on sucking the journaling mailbox dry. What are they missing?

Dave Shackelford
Shackelford Consulting

 

[58sniper]

Plenty. It only does envelope capturing. Meta data such as read status, modified body, etc, are not captured. Non-mail items are generally not captured, either. Journaling also introduces a substantial IOPS impact on the server. There is a 15-30% decrease in server performance (Microsoft often recommends a dedicated journaling server). If you didn't engineer this into the Exchange design when thinking about storage and performance, you're in for a rude awakening when you turn it on.

Disclaimer - I work for a major archiving vendor for Exchange and file servers. Anything else I might say could be construed as a sales pitch. That is not my intent. But journaling based archiving isn't the best solution.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/