The fact that email has become one of the most important forms of communication in the corporate world is non-debatable. Right from the initial communication to sending quotations, invoices, etc. everything is done via emails. It can be easily said that the value of emails has become equivalent to what the validity of written documents were a few years ago. This makes it important to protect and store the emails properly.
While sending and receiving emails are quick and time saving, there are several problems associated with this type of communication. With each employee receiving thousands of emails every month, it puts on a lot of pressure on the company email servers. Moreover, looking for an email that was received or sent months or perhaps years ago can be a daunting task. Apart from this, there is always the fear of deleting important emails either by mistake or purposefully. Due to all these reasons, most companies feel the need to have a system that can protect and store their company emails indefinitely. This is where email archiving comes into picture.
What is Email Archiving?
Email archiving is a process where the emails sent or received by every individual in a company is removed from the primary email database and stored in a secondary one. This can either be done manually or automatically, although most companies prefer automatic email archiving. In the later process, the emails are archived during the transportation stage and are saved either in a magnetic disk storage or a cloud based storage.
This are archived in the secondary email database, and these include not just the text content but also the attachments with every mail. These are also indexed so as to make it easier to search for them when the need arises. The emails are saved in read-only format so that the records are always available in their original state, and no one can make any changes to it. These archives can only be accessed by authorized personnel.
Do Email Archiving Solutions Provide Security?
While there are several benefits of email archiving, one of the most important ones is security. As mentioned earlier, it considered equivalent to written (hard copy documents), and hence it is important to secure them in case you need to produce them in case of litigation in the future. In such cases, you can retrieve the right email within a few minutes. Even if the employee to whom the mail was sent to, does not work in the company any longer, the email sent to him can be retrieved easily with the help of the archives. As no one can tamper with or endanger the archived emails in any way, email archiving solutions provide 100% security to all your important emails.
While email archiving makes managing and maintaining old emails easy, it also gives complete security to businesses. Moreover, a mail that may look inconsequential today may seem important in the future. For all these reasons, opting for a solid mail archiving solution is a good idea for small, medium and large businesses.