10 must-have features in email archiving solutions

Email archiving has been a standard practice for decades. It began as simple file storage and evolved into the dedicated email archiving solution it is now. Decades ago, admins saved copies of emails as EML or PST files in their local systems, which served as an email archive. Because compliance regulations around the globe are now mandated, the need to securely archive emails has become a necessity. With growing data protection and compliance concerns, the expectations of email archiving solutions have increased exponentially.

Email archiving solutions offer features that provide a well-rounded and secure experience. In this article, we'll discuss 10 essential features that every email archiving service must have, and how these features can help with archiving emails as well as eDiscovery to fulfill compliance and legal requirements.

Essential email archiving features

Email archiving solutions offer a range of features, from rudimentary to advanced.

As a baseline, every archiving solution must be fast to ensure that search and retrieval of data can be accomplished quickly. The interface of the software must be simple and intuitive to use so that users can archive and retrieve data with minimum effort. More importantly, archiving solutions need to have advanced security measures and secure encryption to protect the data being archived.

To help you ensure top-notch data security and compliance, we've compiled a list of 10 features that every admin should look for when selecting an email archiving solution.

Fast eDiscovery

One of the main requirements for email archiving solutions is the ability to find a specific email or set of emails from the thousands that have been archived. Archiving solutions need to have advanced search engines for simple and fast eDiscovery. These solutions need to be comprehensive, easy to use, advanced, and fast enough to search through the huge volume of archived emails. After all, requests for these specific emails will often have a time constraint due to a court order or other legal demands.

Here are some of the must-have search engine features:

1. The capability to look for emails based on different sets of criteria such as sender, email subject, content, attachments, and other parameters.

2. The possibility to combine different search parameters in one query to narrow down emails by mentioning multiple conditions that the email might fall under.

3. The capability to search for emails using the beginning or end of certain terms by entering the prefix or affix of the term—even if the entire term is not entered.

4. The capability to find emails with attachments by entering the extension or type of attachment, the attachment name, and other data.

5. The ability to search based on date ranges, specific user accounts, and departments.

6. The possibility to view search results before exporting them so the results can be verified before exporting the data for further use.

With these features in hand, finding that one elusive email and producing it in the right format becomes a much simpler and efficient process.

Custom retention policy

Most email archiving solutions have default retention policies, in which you can define the number of days emails falling under that policy need to be retained. This policy can then be applied to a group of people. In addition to the default retention policy, it's important that you're able to create custom retention policies to cater to the needs of different employees.

By creating custom retention policies, you can define a different retention duration for each policy, set different conditions based on which emails need to be retained, and assign the policies to users based on their roles and the importance of their email data.

For example, if your organization employs people on a contractual basis, you can create a policy specific to contract employees, making the retention conditions more stringent to ensure that you keep a closer eye on emails sent by them or to them. These policies can also be created and used for specific departments, ensuring an entire department's emails are retained based on the same conditions.

With custom retention policies in place, you can also make sure that different types of email data, such as customer support emails, invoices, and legal data, adhere to industrial and regional compliance laws by configuring policies relevant to each type of data.

Secure email encryption

With organizations relying on emails for their formal communication, the sensitivity of the information they contain is widely understood. Emails that you choose to archive will contain vital information that may be required as part of a contract or compliance law. The sensitive nature of these emails calls for the maximum possible level of security. This can be achieved only if the archiving solution offers standard encryption protocols for the data.

Archived emails need to be encrypted both in transit and at rest to ensure that the data is not tampered with in either stage. Through encryption, emails are converted into coded content that can be made legible only when decrypted with the right keys and authorization. Such security measures prevent these mails from being intercepted during transit and safeguard them through the archival duration. AES 256 encryption is an advanced standard of encryption that ensures your data doesn't fall into the hands of unauthorized parties.

Comprehensive audit trails

Every action performed in an email archiving portal is sensitive in nature. Because multiple admins would have access to the archiving portal, it's essential that these actions are recorded along with detailed information.

This information is particularly useful when you need to hold someone liable for an event or an action that has been performed. Archiving solutions record these actions in the form of audit logs. With audit logs, admins can drill down on the specifics of a performed action and get all of the required details to spot exactly who has completed an action, the time, and the user accounts on which the action was performed.

This ensures a tamper-proof record of all actions, including access, retrieval, modification, and deletion of emails, policies, legal holds, and more. Actions such as retention policy modifications, investigation creations, email searches, email holds created, email exports, and all other user-related actions can be kept track of and monitored with the audit logs feature. This helps organizations maintain transparency among admins and comply with the regulations set forth for the organization based on the industry and the region.

Extensive data management

To manage the storage in mailboxes efficiently, admins archive important older emails. Doing this for each of their users greatly increases the count of archived emails, in turn increasing the amount of data contained in an email archiving service. To help manage this data efficiently, archiving solutions need to provide options to manage the emails without having to intervene manually.

Most email archiving solutions achieve this by allowing admins to set up retention policies for a certain duration. Based on the priority assigned to different kinds of email data, the duration for which they need to be retained can be decided, and policies with the relevant duration can be applied accordingly.

Archiving solutions also provide options to purge the data once it's no longer needed. To produce emails as part of a legal inquiry or compliance audit, admins usually export the data in the required format. Archiving solutions provide the option to purge the data once it's exported and served its purpose. This option can be used to free up storage for newer emails that need to be archived.

Legal hold creation

A legal hold refers to the process of preserving a certain email or a bunch of emails without any modification, deletion, or alteration until further legal notice.

Email archiving solutions most commonly serve the purpose of eDiscovery when a legal or compliance request comes in. Sometimes, eDiscovery can also be performed by organizations to look for breaches in contract or violations of the company's terms. When an admin spots an email that can assist with an inquiry, they need to make sure that the email isn't modified in any form by the other admins in the organization. They should ensure that the email isn't deleted from the archiving service if it's nearing the end of the retention period. In such cases, a legal hold comes to aid.

By typing in a search query to identify the relevant emails, admins can make a list of emails that will assist them with the inquiry and further place a hold on them. Once a hold is placed on emails, they cannot be modified or deleted. Emails with holds placed on them will be retained even if the retention duration has lapsed. An effective archiving solution allows admins to place holds for specific emails, users, or departments, aiding the effective preservation of information at the requested level.

Compatibility with all email providers

Your organization could be using any email provider. Your emails could be hosted with any vendor of your choice, and they could be hosted on the cloud, on-premise, or using a hybrid setup. There are many variations and options to choose from when you pick whom to host your email with. You can choose to host some of your organization's user accounts with one provider and some with another provider by configuring split delivery. The archiving solution that you choose should have the capability to capture emails from both of these providers and work seamlessly in archiving the email data.

To ensure that your data isn't stored all in one place, it's best to archive it with a vendor other than your email provider. An archiving solution with seamless compatibility and migration options from your email provider is a must. The process of archiving should be attainable without the need for any special servers or hardware equipment.  

Flexible configuration options

For an email archiving solution to capture and store data, emails need to be sent to the archiving solution by the email recipient server. The method by which data is captured by the archiving solution should be defined by the admin. Because the requirements and terms followed by each organization will be different, archiving solutions should provide multiple ways to achieve this and let admins choose whichever option works best for them.

Advanced email archiving solutions provide options to archive using three different methods. They are the MX method, API method, and journaling method. Each method has its pros and cons. Based on the organization's priorities, admins can choose the method of their choice. A good archiving solution should provide the option to choose what suits them best.

User access to archived emails

Organizations have users with different levels of importance. For example, data pertaining to members of the C-suite is more important than that of other employees. This coupled with the huge amount of email data makes it difficult for admins to handle this data securely just by themselves.

Email archiving solutions help admins address this need by allowing them to provide access for certain users to view their archived emails. High-profile users in the organization can be granted access to view their own archived emails. In case the need arises to look for an older email that's not present in their mailbox, they can simply enter a query matching the emails they're looking for, locate the email, and view the email contents. This simplifies the need for admins to intervene for every email access request, provided some of these requests could be very context-specific and time-consuming.

Compliance of the software

If your organization decides to pick an email archiving solution, it means that you place enough trust in the provider to decide to store your important emails with them. This trust becomes redundant if your archiving solution doesn't adhere to the compliance standards of the region and industry that they're a part of. Make sure that the provider is compliant with the common regulations that are applicable to them so that your data is stored per industry and regional guidelines.

 Wrapping up 

Choosing an email archiving solution is an important decision. When making the choice of which provider to go with, check if these features are available. These features ensure that your archived email data stays secure and encrypted while providing a seamless and hassle-free eDiscovery experience.

eProtect is a cloud-based email archiving and security solution that provides email archiving for cloud and on-premise email providers. The solution offers secure email archiving, quick eDiscovery, and data export to ensure organizations stay compliant and are prepared for all legal enquiries. eProtect is the archiving solution powering Zoho Mail, a platform trusted by millions of users.