Email Archiving

What is email archiving?

Email archiving describes the process of storing and preserving emails and their attachments in a secure and compliant manner, making all sent and received email messages available for you to retrieve.

Why should you archive your emails?

Archiving your emails is important for many reasons:

• Data retention and compliance: Archiving emails prevents you from accidentally deleting emails, and safeguards you from data loss, or data corruption. Even if important messages get deleted from individual mailboxes, these will be preserved in a safe archive storage, making sure that valuable information is safely secured. Email archiving enables you to comply with regulatory and legal requirements, minimizing the risk for potential legal issues and penalties.
• E-Discovery: Email archiving is an important part of e-discovery, and a good email archiving solution will provide you with the tools you need to easily and accurately perform e-discovery.
• Storage management: With the ever-increasing amount of data that organizations are confronted with, optimizing storage resources and improving the performance of email systems is more important than ever. By archiving older emails, your inbox can run faster and more efficiently.
• Business continuity: In the event of an unforeseeable disruption or disaster, having an archive that stores critical information is crucial. It helps minimize downtime, ensures important communication remains accessible even during a crisis, and facilitates disaster recovery.

Email archiving best practices

While each organization should work to clearly define their own email archiving needs and best practices, there are some universal features that email archiving solutions should offer. These solutions should:

• Be highly secure and scalable - Security is essential to protect sensitive communications from unauthorized access or tampering. At the same time, a scalable solution ensures the archive can grow with the organization without impacting performance.
• Cut the cost and complexity of managing email archives - Modern archiving solutions should reduce reliance on manual processes and eliminate the need for costly hardware. Automation and intuitive controls help IT teams save time and reduce administrative burden.
• Aggregate data across multiple platforms - A centralized archive should capture emails and related data from various systems and communication tools, ensuring consistency and simplifying oversight across the organization.
• Improve access - Users and administrators should be able to locate and retrieve messages quickly and easily. Search tools should be intuitive, responsive, and available across devices to support day-to-day operations and emergency scenarios.
• Accelerate searches - Fast and precise search functionality is critical for legal discovery, audits, and internal reviews. The ability to apply filters and retrieve relevant messages quickly supports both compliance and productivity.
• Simplify data recovery - Accidental deletions or technical failures happen—an effective archiving system should make it easy to restore lost messages without complex procedures or long delays.
• Improve workflow efficiency - Archiving should not be a bottleneck. With features like automated retention rules, user self-service access, and seamless integration with existing systems, archiving can enhance operational efficiency across teams.

On-premises vs. cloud email archiving

Organizations have two primary options for managing archived email: on-premises solutions and cloud-based platforms. Each approach has distinct advantages and trade-offs depending on business needs, scale, and infrastructure.

• On-premises email archiving stores data locally on an email server, offering direct control over access and configuration. However, maintaining hardware, scaling storage, and ensuring email security can quickly become costly and complex, especially as email volumes grow.
• Cloud email archiving, on the other hand, offers flexible storage and reduced administrative overhead. Archived data is stored off-site in secure environments, allowing organizations to easily scale storage and apply consistent email retention policies. This setup also improves accessibility, enabling users to retrieve emails from anywhere with internet access.

On-premises solutions may appeal to organizations with strict internal controls. Meanwhile, cloud archiving is often preferred for its resilience, searchability, and simplified email management.

Email Archiving Compliance

Effective email archiving is essential for maintaining compliance with legal and regulatory frameworks that govern email messaging and electronic communications.

Compliance requirements often mandate the preservation of archived email in a tamper-proof format for a specified period. This means organizations must implement a clear email retention policy to determine how long data should be kept, where it’s stored, and who can access it.

Key compliance features include:

• Long-term, immutable storage of archived data
• The ability to quickly retrieve emails for audits, investigations, or legal discovery
• Role-based access controls to ensure secure handling of sensitive communications
• Search and export capabilities to support legal holds and recordkeeping

Without a reliable archiving system in place, organizations may face penalties, data loss, or security vulnerabilities. Establishing a compliant archiving process is a proactive step toward stronger email security.

Archiving emails is easier with Mimecast

Archiving emails is an important part of enterprise data retention practices, but it gets increasingly complicated and expensive as the volume of email data accelerates. To simplify archiving emails, you need email archive tools and archive storage solutions that are affordable and easy to use, so your IT department can focus on more pressing challenges.

Mimecast provides a leading cloud email service with solutions for securing and archiving emails, and ensuring email continuity even during a disaster. Mimecast Cloud Archive for Email is a secure and dynamically-scalable solution for archiving emails for fast access to email and centralized retention policy management. It simplifies email backup and supports the needs of regulatory compliance.

Mimecast solutions for archiving emails

Cloud Archive for Email reduces the cost and complexity of archiving emails, searching for content and managing retention. Providing users with a bottomless mailbox and administrators with superior management tools for archiving emails, Cloud Archive for Email lets enterprises maximize the value of information stored in email archives.

Archiving emails with Cloud Archive for Email is simple. Using journal, gateway and synchronizing technologies, Cloud Archive for Email aggregates email from multiple collection points, retaining the original email, detailed meta-data and a copy of the email if it was changed by company policy enforcement. Administrators use a single web-based console to set retention policies, perform e-discovery, manage users, and respond to litigation hold requests. Users search their personal archives from anywhere using any device.

Benefits of archiving emails with Mimecast

Mimecast's solution for archiving emails enables you to:

• Minimize the cost and complexity of archiving emails. Mimecast eliminates the need for on-premises hardware or email archiving software, helping to significantly reduce the expense of email archiving.
• Provide users with easier access to all of their email. Users can access email with tools they know well and work with familiar personal folder structures.
• Enable users to access email on-the-go. With Mimecast, users can access any email they have ever sent or received on their mobile device.
• Improve performance by removing the need to keep large volumes of email on email servers.
• Simplify management with easy-to-use tools for archiving emails, including superior mailbox management capabilities.