Email Archiving Best Practices

20 Nov 2022 - sj, tags: archiving,, compliance,, insights

The IT policy should have a section about the email archive. Have a clear communication about its purpose, what you archive, how long you retain emails, etc. The IT policy should designate the data officers and auditors.

Encourage users to self support themselves using the archive freeing up IT resources. Users may search, download, restore their own email, additionally they may apply searchable tags and notes.

Anticipate the email volume you are about to archive, and assign resources (disk, memory and cpu) accordingly. When using a virtual machine, you may utilize thin provisioning.

Involve stakeholders, especially finance, legal and HR to determine the retention period for archived emails.

Review the retention policies on an annual basis to make sure they are up-to-date to current regulations.

Avoid PST files as email archives for your own good. They are unmanagable, fragile, prone to corrupton, and pose a serious risk of data loss.

Use automation as much as possible to enhance your productivity. The archive not only automatically captures the sent and received emails, but you can automate the legal hold process and the removal of aged emails based on their retention values.

The email archive is a crucial productivity asset. Be sure to backup regularly.

Monitor the archive. Piler enterprise supports Prometheus style monitoring as well as centralized logging.

Use a centralized user database, eg. LDAP, Active Directory, Azure AD, etc.

Enable 2FA authentication for enchanced security.