Archiving mail sounds like a boring and laborious task that few companies would voluntarily embroil themselves in.  Unfortunately it is an important and unavoidable part of doing business today.

It is believed that up to 85% of business correspondence and communication is electronic.  All of these records have to be stored and archived for anything up to six years, depending on the current legislation.

So what is it?  Archiving mail means the storage of all electronic messages used by your business.  Storage is only a small part of the equation though.  As well as storing the mails, an effective archive solution has to be able to retrieve them too.  That means having a system that time and date stamps the mails, indexes them and then stores them securely.  A reporting functionality is important too so you can manage the emails and take into account any extra hardware needs or plan for expansions.

To comply with the relevant legislation the copies must be in at least two disparate locations, easily retrievable, time stamped and whole.  That is obviously an oversimplification of the law that relates to archiving mail, but I will cover the specifics in a later post.

As well as your legal obligations, archiving mail will also help in disaster recovery situations.  With businesses so reliant on email, it pays to have resilience if the worst should happen.  You need to have recent copies of all your communications so any emergency situation can be easily recovered.

Email archiving and compliance may sound dull, but it is essential that any business understands its importance in the world today.