Affordable Email Archiving: Open Source Solutions

Organizations are required to retain emails for a predetermined period by law. Earlier, email attachments were printed and stored for legal requirements. However, this proved to be a cumbersome task and not a very efficient arrangement. Thus, enterprises started using email archiving as a solution to store emails in their original state and retrieve them whenever the need arises.

exchange online archiving setup

With the rising popularity of email archiving in the enterprise infrastructure, there are various vendors in the market which offer on-premise email archiving, as well as cloud-based storage. Some examples are ArcTitan, CloudBerry Backup, email archiving Office 365, etc. These solutions support the following features:

  1. Retentions and Archiving Rules
  2. Keep Audit Logs
  3. Email Tagging
  4. Legal Complaints
  5. Bulk import/exports emails
  6. Text Search
  7. View, transfer emails.
  8. Action reporting

Email Archiving – A Legal Requirement For Enterprises

Email archiving also provides legally compliant storage and other benefits to the organizations. Each country requires businesses within their jurisdiction to store emails for a certain period for auditory purposes. This is so because many of the emails might contain legal or tax-related information that needs to be saved. Thus, the storage of emails and other electronic records is a legal requirement that should be followed by every organization.

The auditory requirement states that there should be no change made to the received email, and it should be stored as it is. Thus comes the necessity for archiving solutions that are capable of preventing both intentional tampering and accidental altering.

duo o365
exchange online archiving office 365

Popular Email Archiving Open-Source Solutions

There are several reliable providers offering email archiving open-source, such as Piler, MailArchiv, MailArchiva, etc. Some open-source solutions can also be used as Exchange email archiving appliance. Let’s take a look at the functioning of these archiving appliances to understand how efficient and reliable they are.

Most of the email archiving open-source solutions are Linux, Solaris operating systems based. The functioning procedure and features of all these solutions are more or less the same.

  1. Initially, email is transmitted to the archive using SMTP. Besides, that is also passively polled by the archiving system.
  2. Retrieval of an email is done by using POP3 or IMAP calls to a journaling mailbox. Email messages are stored with attachments in the database or archive file. A web client manages and controls all the systems. It has an optional directory, and all the necessary management features inbuilt.
  3. Emails are retrieved from SMTP mail archive servers such as Microsoft Exchange, and after that, emails are imported in different formats. All the data in emails are encrypted and transferred using various algorithms and then stored in the file systems or database. There are few popular search engines, and searching is handled by using one of them.
  4. All the metadata of the machine is stored in the MySQL database. There are rules set for duplication and deduplication, which apply in both emails and their attachments.
  5. Authentication is generally controlled and handled by IMAP servers.

What Is The Benefit Of Email Archiving Open Source Solutions?

It may be challenging for some enterprises to allocate funds for premium archiving services. For such businesses, open-source solutions offer an affordable means of email archiving. Also, these solutions are often reliable enough to meet the archiving requirements of businesses.

office 365 online archiving

Join the thousands of organizations that use DuoCircle


Find out how affordable it is for your organization today and be pleasantly surprised.

Interested in our Partner Program for MSPs and VARs? Visit Our MSP Partner Program.

Pin It on Pinterest