Reviewing Zimbra Network edition’s email archiving capabilities
What is Zimbra?
The Zimbra Network edition comes in 2 flavours: Professional Edition and Standard Edition. The Professional Edition offers custom retention policies, litigation hold, email archiving and discovery. In this article we’ll explore Zimbra’s archiving capabilities.
How Zimbra email archiving works
When installing Zimbra you need to enable the archiving component of the MTA. When archiving is configured for an account, eg. alice@aaa.fu then the email is copied to her archive account, eg. alice-20210320@aaa.fu.archive. The default archive account format is ${USER}-${YYYYMMDD}@${DOMAIN}.archive.
Zimbra also checks the Message-ID, and if you sent the very same email (with the same Message-ID) twice or more, then it would discard the additional copies, which is a nice thing.
It’s possible to selectively archive accounts, in fact you need to create an archive account for each user account you want to archive emails for.
When it comes to searching in the archive, you need the Admin Console. Administrators may enter some search criteria, and create a search job. The job puts the matching emails to a folders of the selected user accounts. Optionally the search job may send a notification email to the user. See some nice screenshots at the Zimbra site.
Some disadvantages
The recommended approach is to have a separate host (either physical or virtual, or even in the cloud) running the archive. Then anything happens with the Zimbra host, you can still access your emails in the archive while IT is working on recovering the Zimbra host.
Can you justify the extra cost of Zimbra's email archiving?
Well, using piler enterprise they could have cut even lower their costs.
Conclusion
Zimbra is a nice email and collaboration platform, however it has lacks features even the most basic email archiving product provides such as email compression, deduplication, encryption, roles, auditing, and self service capabilities for users just to name a few.
It’s recommended to use a third party product if you need email archiving. I’ll show you how to archive Zimbra’s emails using Piler enterprise in the next article.