Email archival or Email Journaling is an essential compliance mechanism in many industries. Regulatory bodies of certain industries require companies to keep records of all communications between the company and its clients. In today’s multichannel world this could be quite a challenge. In our latest release we have addressed this challenge on behalf of our clients.
Email archival or email journaling is the process of storing a copy of email messages in a searchable archive. At the very low end you will find email archival done by your email user agent. Such a local archive is great for individual users but won’t cut it even in an SME let alone corporate environment.
When we get to compliance-level archival/journaling we will be looking at centralized storage and search systems that can guarantee data redundancy and message protection. This is where email archive is no longer an easy, off-the-shelf feature of your email client but a specialty solution.
And when we say specialty solution we mean it. Email archival is not as easy as it seems and there are many things to consider. You might be thinking this is a simple archive but it could easily mean billions of messages than need to be searchable.
Just consider a very simple scenario – your 10k employes send 5 messages per day each and receive additional 5. Right there we have 100kmessages per day, 500k per week, 2m per month, 24m per year. And this does not include any non-business emails. Now add your transactional and commercial communications on top of this. Did you say another 20 million per month or more? Scale this up to the annual volume and multiply by the usual 5yr retention period – that’s a lot of emails to store and search.
The archival on the business end is usually performed by the business mail server – Exchange365, Google Workspace, you name it. There is usually a simple journaling method available that allows you to simply plug in your archival system and have all messages stored. It’s quite difference when you venture outside these tightly controlled environments into the realm of SMTP and API sending.
This is where senders struggle to be compliant – it means sending a copy of each message to the archive system – usually by adding a BCC recipient. Just think about how many methods of sending there are – billing system, customer helpdesk, your CRM, notifications, marketing, the list goes on. For every system the archival has to be implemented in one way or another. Some systems will allow you to do copies of all messages, others will require customizations. With some you will be outright stuck with zero options.
When our customers started asking about email journaling we knew we had to tackle this issue from a different angle. Rather than telling them to use the BCC feature (which they could not), or building a journaling system on our end (which would go against our principles of low data retention), we decided to give them an easy to use email journaling feature.
Email Journaling in Omnivery is a matter of flipping one switch and entering the email address or the archive. Once added all messages will be seamlessly cloned as they pass through our system and sent to the archive email address. No need to add any BCC recipients, no changes to SMTP or API submission. Just a simple setting in the UI of our system. This also means no vendor-lock – you are free to use email journaling system of your choice and we’ll simply send the messages there. Whether you prefer a cloud-based or on-premise archie; Smarsh, Intradyn or Data443 – we support them all the same and will work with your archival solution of choice.