If you're in business, and don't already have an email archiving solution in place, you're way behind the times. Not only is almost every business in the country liable for email storage of some kind, there are also plenty myths surrounding email archiving.

We're going to dispel some of them here by highlighting the myth, then providing a case for ignoring it. Each is based on fact. We're not promoting a product, we're not selling a service, we're just providing information.

Reason 1. Email archiving is expensive. While an in-house infrastructure can be extremely expensive to implement, email archiving isn't so much. If your business uses email anyway, you're bound to have an email server, or use of one. An email archive will work off the back of an existing server and archive emails. Microsoft Exchange 2010 has archiving built-in, as does other proprietary email servers.

If you don't want to host your own, SaaS can interact with your email server and manage email archives from there. There is no initial investment needed, it turns into a monthly expense instead.

In the longer term, email archiving can save money. Firstly in protecting you from litigation, and fines for non-compliance, but also for network storage. Anyone who has had to implement a NAS, knows how expensive it can be. Moving email archives off the main mail server or network allows for much cheaper storage solutions.

Reason 2. It's difficult to implement. If your company isn't of a size to have its own IT department, setting up new infrastructure can appear daunting. Using cloud computing takes away just about all the possible complications that can arise from it.

There are also email archiving servers that just attach to your network and all you have to do it point it to your mail server. That's the limit of the configuration needed. For those for whom IT isn't a scary prospect, many email archiving platforms are relatively straightforward to set up and use.

Reason 3.E-discovery doesn't apply to me. E-discovery applies to every business in the country. At one level or another you're subject to legislation controlling the storage of email information. While you may not have seen an e-discovery request yet, that doesn't mean there isn't one in the pipeline.

Ignoring the law is something that we don't support. For the relatively small expense, and modest system overhead, an email archive is something every business should have.

Reason 4. Email Archives don't work with Outlook. While far from the only email client on the market, Microsoft's Outlook is the most popular. It's a common myth that third-party email archives can't handle PST files. Just about all of the third-party, and self-hosted email archive solutions support Exchange.